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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 10, 2008 is:
posse \PAH-see\ noun
1 : a large group often with a common interest
2 : a body of persons summoned by a sheriff to assist in preserving the public peace usually in an emergency
3 : a group of people temporarily organized to make a search (as for a lost child)
4 : one’s attendants or associates
Examples:
"On the Saturday morning we used to watch anxiously for the usual signs of activity and when we saw a large barrel of beer being escorted up the streets by a posse of small boys, we knew that all was well." (Edmund Barber, Country Life, October 12, 1951)
Did you know?
"Posse" started out as a technical term in law, part of the term "posse comitatus," which in Medieval Latin meant "power or authority of the county." As such, it referred to a group of citizens summoned by a sheriff to preserve the public peace as allowed for by law. "Preserving the public peace" so often meant hunting down a supposed criminal that "posse" eventually came to mean any group organized to make a search or embark on a mission. In even broader use it can refer to any group, period. Sometimes nowadays that group is a gang or a rock band but it can as easily be any group -- of politicians, models, architects, tourists, children, or what have you -- acting in concert.
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