My online thesaurus came up with a “no results found” for wellness. The Encarta dictionary says it means “physical well-being especially when maintained or achieved through good diet and regular exercise.”

My 35-year old Random House dictionary apparently never heard of it.

The OED says that wellness is the “state of soundness, good health.” Its first reference for the word is 1605 when Sir A. Johnstone used it.

The OED calls wellness a nonce-wd which sounds like a scholarly way of saying it’s bullshit. The OED hints that wellness is the opposite of illness which makes sense but we already have words for that. Wellness seems to be the precious way of saying health.

In the real world, wellness has never been much more than a marginal word. But when you Google wellness you get 114,000,000 hits, including a ton of references to alternative medicine and things like Wellness® Cat and Dog Food, Wellness.com, and a National Wellness Institute. This isn’t just bullshit, it’s the Augean Stables.

There’s a lot of that going around these days and I worry about the healthness of the good old English language. But if it helps sell things to the people who want to pay a lot of money, then what the heck.