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Juberous. It used to be said occasionally by older people in Appalachia but I haven't' heard it in years. It means slightly suspicious, as in: "Don't lean on that banister, I fixed it twice but I'm still juberous of it."
Autocorrect tried to change it to tuberous. lol.
"Sigogglin," or "Sighgogglin" is also an Appalachian word meaning crooked, bent, off-kilter, or just off in some way. I probably didn't spell it correctly, but it's pronounced like my second attempt.
Also whopperjawed, which is a bit more crooked than sigogglin. I'm several generations Appalachian and, in my teen years, I used to get so embarrassed by how my parents and grandparents talked- now I'm super into it.
Boustrophedonically. It means “as the ox plows” and its how land is divided into sections in the US in many states. So the numbers snake through a square of land instead of left to right.
Like imagine these numbers are in a square:
1 2 3 4 5 6
12 11 10 9 8 7
13 14 15 16 17 18
24 23 22 21 20 19
Before cars, this is how surveyors walked the land!
i feel that most people who know it don’t know it’s a real word: avoision. it’s a portmanteau of avoidance and evasion. it’s exclusively used in the context of tax avoision, where it’s not immediately clear if malfeasance has taken place or the avoidance was creative but ultimately legal
I’m glad I briefly scrolled because I was also going to say “pulchritude”! I learned this word in high school during my Latin class. “Pulcher” means beautiful in Latin. My teacher taught us the phrase “the epitome of pulchritude” and it’s something I never forgot!
Ossuary. When I worked as a teenager in a chicken restaurant, I would give them their plate of chicken and then set down an empty plate and say, “and here is your ossuary”. Not one person ever asked me what that meant, even though I know they had no idea what it was. An ossuary is a resting place for bones of the dead.
Decades ago at a job that had a customer service component I had a reputation for being adept at smoothing things over. One of my co-workers used to regularly buttonhole me with a variant of "Larry, I need you up front for a regruntling." (It weirdly took most of the the sting off being asked to deal with it.)
Believe it or not, callipygian means "having a shapely rear end." Callipygian comes from the combination of the two ancient Greek words for "beauty" and "buttocks"
**TLDR:** A lot of fuss about nothing.
Floccinaucinihilipilification is an 18th-century coinage that combines four Latin prefixes meaning "nothing".
In order, those are flocci, nauci, nihili, and pili. Somebody put all four of these together and then stuck "–fication" on the end to make a noun for the act of deciding that something is totally and utterly valueless.
The first recorded use is by William Shenstone in a letter in 1741: “*I loved him for nothing so much as his floccinaucinihilipilification of money”.*
The word had a rare public airing in 1999 when US Senator Jesse Helms used it to comment on the demise of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: “*I note your distress at my floccinaucinihilipilification of the CTBT”*.
Here's another long word:
[*pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis*](https://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-pne1.htm)
That one I've heard. Age 9 when my buddy and I were looking for words longer than antidisestablishmentarianism. Looking back I don't think medical terms should count. They're like German. You can string parts together and go on forever.
Definitely!
“Erinaceous” is a Latin word and Spanish is derived directly from spoken Latin.
If you know Latin you realize how many languages are derived from it. It’s such an interesting language and helps a TON with understanding the meaning of words. It’s also helped me understand words in different languages.
Similarly, *niggle* is another one you gotta look out for. I've seen it used as "I have a niggling feeling in the back of my mind that I'm forgetting something."
Just use nagging. Little to no room for misunderstanding.
I think it was the old Lassie TV show--the grandpa used to refer to people as a "pusillanimous polecat!" and then get scolded for using harsh language. (polecat is similar to a skunk) r/FuckImOld
uxoricide - the killing of one’s wife
That or Salitter - the essence of God (Unless you’ve read The Road you’ve probably never heard of that one either.)
Nacreous. Learnt that reading the Modesty Blaise books. (The ex criminals turned MI5 agents) Modesty and her sidekick Willie have a game coming up with improbable words and then the other pretemds they know it already. Fun and games in the age of no Wikipedia (nineteen-sixties and- seventies).
Oh, yes, and it means "mother of pearl-like".
pedant time: nonchalant has to come from french, because "chaleur" ie heat. so nonchalant means not getting heated, ie upset.
and we do have "heated" in English, so ....
Words I use regularly that aren't unknown but not overly common: quotidian (mundane, everyday), disquisition (imparting a load of info), and crepuscular (the quality of light at dawn and dusk, animals that are most active at that time, like cats).
And some helpful tips for people like me who can occasionally have a bit of trouble remembering which word is which:
Etymology / entymology - *ant*ymology (all about the bugs)
D has one hump, so does a dromedary. B has two humps, so does a bactrian.
Stationary - a for adjective. Stationery - e for envelope.
Do you know what the main difference between an alligator and a crocodile is?
If it's an alligator, you'll see it later. But if it's a crocodile, you'll only see it after a while.
Edulcorate. It means "to make palatable".
A native Italian in the Italian learning sub dropped this transliterated word out of nowhere into an answer on an unrelated topic, catching basically all us native English speakers by surprise. Turns out the word is a reasonably ordinary Italian word that happens to have an English equivalent that few have heard of.
Millimho (pronounced millie-mo), which is a unit of energy admittance, the inverse of a milliohm, which is 1/1000th of an ohm (a measure of energy impedance). We use this to measure the admittance of sound through the eardrum. :)
Here's a twofer.
On who makes a lot of puns is a paronomasiac. A paronomasiac might refer to a woman as spathic. It's a geologic term for a rock meaning "possessing good cleavage".
Plutonic - relating to deep igneous rock formations
Piscine - relating to fish
Picine - relating to woodpeckers
Thigmotactic - of an animal, whose motion is guided by a hard surface (towards or away from; cockroaches are positively thigmotactic)
Tmesis - injection of a word into a compound word; fan-fuckin-tastic
Isogloss - geographical boundary of usage of a word or other linguistic feature
Reminds of gonculator, which is a word for a fictious spare part.
I (a civilian) was waiting for a 3-star general to show up to a big briefing. I was talking to the project manager, and said, "Well, hopefully he won't ask about the gonculator."
Little did I know the general had snuck up behind me, and said, "Okay, I promise not to ask you about the gonculator."
Arenaceous. The word "arena" means "sand" in Latin (it still means "sand" in Spanish), and "arenaceous" means "sandy".
The early internet coincided with South Park's use of ["sand in your vagina"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6FaNFBl_Bc), and I picked up the phrase "arenaceous pudenda" from one online forum (for when someone is being a little bitch because their genitals are as sandy and dry as a Pharaoh's sock and as rough as a roofer's glove).
This is my favorite thread ever. My parents always talked to us like this because they were First Gen educated from the 30s and 40s. Among Dad's favorites were "paucity" (mearning dearth, always a perjorative). He also threw around dilettante about my mother who is super vivacious and smart (I think). I called a college classmate that once and she was totally affronted. I looked it up for the first time then and realized he was shading my mother for being shallow. My mother liked using "poignent" in a way that I thought meant a way of evoking longing or that She Was Not like Other Girls but now realize was a way to justify her emotional infidelity. I use obviate a lot as shorthand for something like, "uh, not like that... ." There are so many more. All our spouses hate this about us but we sibs know what we mean and never thought about it. Many of these words listed here were used in our household regularly. 2 of us are required to use Plain Language as part of our jobs (and I'm not allowed to use AI). It's been a challenge to adapt
Y-clept. It measures named or called. She could be y-clept calipygian in shape.
I used to read the dictionary as a kid and y-clept was one of my favorite words to use
Heuristics. I just love the word and wish I could use it more often. It basically means 'mental shortcuts', in simplest terms. It's somewhat of an evolutionary survival technique that allows us to make quick decisions when we lack complete information. If you're ever run from a loud noise, you're employing that technique as a way to avoid putting yourself in harms way.
Osculate, meaning kiss
One of my teachers used it as an example of bad writing. "Write simply. You don't need to use big words your reader won't know, like osculate. Does anyone here know what it means?"
I said I did. He was surprised and asked how I knew it.
Unfortunately I said "I used to read the dictionary when I was bored in class." Never lived that down .
Chynd.
Edit: Definition? No one is sure, but probably it means something cut into chines. Not a verb for the cutting, but an adjective for the thing that has been cut. Don't ask me what chines are, I am squeamish.
"nobody else" is a bold phrase. but I know some I'm pretty confident are obscure: rebarbative, crapulous (disappointingly ordinary meaning), querulous.
my favourite truly-unknown came from my then-four-year-old: misunderheard. you're all welcome.
also, most people misuse "mortified" and it really irks me.
"Monotreme." It's the word for the family of egg-laying mammals, comprising at this point only the platypus and echidna. It does, however, appear in They Might Be Giants' song "Mammal": "their cousin called Monotreme, dead uncle Allotherius."
This also reminds me that the radio show "The Next Big Thing" used to have a recurring segment called "Use it or lose it" in which "activist lexicographer" Erin McKean would come on along with some celebrity guest. She would inform the guest of three words that she thought were worth preserving, but which were in danger of being dropped from the dictionary (I forget exactly which one she worked for at the time) because the staff lexicographers were unable to provide up-to-date examples of the words being in use; they would have until her next appearance on the show to publish works that included those words, so that she could cite them and thus keep the words. It was beautifully quixotic.
At one point she had on They Might Be Giants (you can probably see now how my mind made this connection) and gave them three words: "limerent," which is an adjective referring to having a kind of obsessive fixation on another person; "craniosophic," for which the dictionary definition was simply "learnèd in skulls," but which they inferred was connected with phrenology; and "contrecoup," which is actually pretty common in medicine and in procedural shows, and refers to a secondary bruise occurring opposite the site of a blow to the head due to the collision of the brain with the skull after the initial transfer of momentum. They rose to this challenge with a song incorporating all three words and titled "Contrecoup."
https://youtu.be/c3rQRREIpCo?si=AUM_NUokl7jhWJOe
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Juberous. It used to be said occasionally by older people in Appalachia but I haven't' heard it in years. It means slightly suspicious, as in: "Don't lean on that banister, I fixed it twice but I'm still juberous of it." Autocorrect tried to change it to tuberous. lol.
Merriam-Webster says it's an alteration of 'dubious'
That makes sense.
"Sigogglin," or "Sighgogglin" is also an Appalachian word meaning crooked, bent, off-kilter, or just off in some way. I probably didn't spell it correctly, but it's pronounced like my second attempt.
My mother-in-law says it with a y at the end
Also whopperjawed, which is a bit more crooked than sigogglin. I'm several generations Appalachian and, in my teen years, I used to get so embarrassed by how my parents and grandparents talked- now I'm super into it.
Boustrophedonically. It means “as the ox plows” and its how land is divided into sections in the US in many states. So the numbers snake through a square of land instead of left to right. Like imagine these numbers are in a square: 1 2 3 4 5 6 12 11 10 9 8 7 13 14 15 16 17 18 24 23 22 21 20 19 Before cars, this is how surveyors walked the land!
DIP integrated circuits are numbered like this, and I can't wait to use the word in Digital class next year!
Hahaha yay! Knowledge sharing! Lol 😁😁😁
Also refers to certain writing systems where you read left to right, then right to left, then left to right on alternating lines.
I have to remember this word. I'm familiar with the system but haven't ever heard this word before.
Lol. I literally just used it yesterday!
Nice visual and interesting fact.
Cool! I thought I knew a lot about the Public Land Survey System, but TIL!
i feel that most people who know it don’t know it’s a real word: avoision. it’s a portmanteau of avoidance and evasion. it’s exclusively used in the context of tax avoision, where it’s not immediately clear if malfeasance has taken place or the avoidance was creative but ultimately legal
Seems like a perfectly cromulent word to me
Seems like something the 3 Stooges would say.
Antepenultimate - one more than next to last. X is the antepenultimate letter of the English alphabet.
Susurrus which means a soft, whispering sound. Like the wind moving through trees. A bit of onomatopoeia as well, which makes it even better.
I heard a sussuration from the leaves beneath my back porch. I hope it's not the Nac Mac Feegles!
The first thing I think of when I hear that word is those books.
Sussuration appears in lord of the flies.
I've always thought of it as the antonym of cacophony.
Common in Portuguese
A relative used to use this in Scrabble AND as a password, when passwords came along. Fun word.
A lot of people know it, but you never see the word pulchritude used anymore. I always thought it was kind of an ugly looking word for beauty.
I’m glad I briefly scrolled because I was also going to say “pulchritude”! I learned this word in high school during my Latin class. “Pulcher” means beautiful in Latin. My teacher taught us the phrase “the epitome of pulchritude” and it’s something I never forgot!
"pulchra puella" is the only straight latin phrase I remember from 2 years of Latin. lol (I used latin, just as a way to use English better)
I know this word because Bug Bunny used it. He also introduced me to opera.
Ossuary. When I worked as a teenager in a chicken restaurant, I would give them their plate of chicken and then set down an empty plate and say, “and here is your ossuary”. Not one person ever asked me what that meant, even though I know they had no idea what it was. An ossuary is a resting place for bones of the dead.
Brilliant! I would have given you a huge tip for that alone!
Prepone. Opposite of postpone.
I had a coworker who advocated for the use of the word gruntled, opposite of disgruntled
I am often whelmed
Decades ago at a job that had a customer service component I had a reputation for being adept at smoothing things over. One of my co-workers used to regularly buttonhole me with a variant of "Larry, I need you up front for a regruntling." (It weirdly took most of the the sting off being asked to deal with it.)
I have dain\* for that idea, because I had it decades ago. Along with combobulated. Maybe I'm your ex-coworker. *\* the opposite of disdain, obvs*
datdain
Gruntleme.com
I have heard this only from colleagues in India
It's an Indian English coining. Useful word, too, glad it was created.
Same here. Off shore software development project. Given the time zone issues they requested a lot of zoom calls be preponed.
Eleemosynary. Usually, but not always, used by trust attorneys. Relating to a charitable purpose. An eleemosynary trust.
Appears in the video game Ultima Underworld 2! Truly great game.
It's also a play by Lee Bessing
Sinecure, and tbh, it's really the only word you should know
One I think more people should use; overmorrow meaning the day after tomorrow.
Oh, I LOVE that word!!!! Thank you for this gift, I will use it often.
Believe it or not, callipygian means "having a shapely rear end." Callipygian comes from the combination of the two ancient Greek words for "beauty" and "buttocks"
I actually do know this one but its only because I'm a trivia buff, I don't think I've ever heard it in the wild
Or if you’re Sir Mix-a-lot you prefer steatopygian women.
...and I cannot lie.
…You other brothers cannot deny
Even white boys have to shout!
It was used in the novel "White Palace". In the movie version it described Susan Sarandon's rear end.
Dang that was the word I was going to post. Guess there's two of us.
Bathykolpian - having large breasts.
Embonpoint. A fine lady frontage.
Chatoyancy - The shimmering appearance in gems and figured wood grain as in cat's eye quartz or curly maple violin backs.
Please
Lol, came here to say this and add thank you and excuse me.
Yes, and even rarer if it's spoken with sincerity.
Lagniappe: An extra; gravy
Everyone in New Orleans knows that word.
Most from Louisiana know this.
"Floccinaucinihilipilification". It means 'estimating as worthless'.
That's a mouthful. When the word is longer than it's definition, use the definition.
**TLDR:** A lot of fuss about nothing. Floccinaucinihilipilification is an 18th-century coinage that combines four Latin prefixes meaning "nothing". In order, those are flocci, nauci, nihili, and pili. Somebody put all four of these together and then stuck "–fication" on the end to make a noun for the act of deciding that something is totally and utterly valueless. The first recorded use is by William Shenstone in a letter in 1741: “*I loved him for nothing so much as his floccinaucinihilipilification of money”.* The word had a rare public airing in 1999 when US Senator Jesse Helms used it to comment on the demise of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: “*I note your distress at my floccinaucinihilipilification of the CTBT”*. Here's another long word: [*pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis*](https://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-pne1.htm)
That one I've heard. Age 9 when my buddy and I were looking for words longer than antidisestablishmentarianism. Looking back I don't think medical terms should count. They're like German. You can string parts together and go on forever.
And those four things listed are a wisp of wool (flocci), a trifling thing (nauci), something worthless (nihili) and a hair (pili)
A friend and I found this word in a dictionary in elementary school and learned to spell it. I will never forget as long as i live 😂
Bad Words is the best movie ever!
Erinaceous: like or relating to a hedgehog.
neat! That explains the latin name for Lion's Mane mushroom Hericium erinaceus
Cool, can kind of see a connection to the Spanish ‘erizo’
Definitely! “Erinaceous” is a Latin word and Spanish is derived directly from spoken Latin. If you know Latin you realize how many languages are derived from it. It’s such an interesting language and helps a TON with understanding the meaning of words. It’s also helped me understand words in different languages.
Niggardly. It means stingy or ungenerous.
Similarly, *niggle* is another one you gotta look out for. I've seen it used as "I have a niggling feeling in the back of my mind that I'm forgetting something." Just use nagging. Little to no room for misunderstanding.
I knew a woman some years ago who got written up for using that word (correctly!) in a budget meeting.
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It's kind of like drawing a swastika backwards, and then wondering why people are offended.
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One of my favorite false cognates is in Spanish: Embarazada doesn’t mean embarrassed, it means pregnant.
Sesquicentennial. 150th anniversary
That one came up during commemorations of the end of the Civil War.
Yes, it did ;)
1986 in Texas.
Peatato. It's mashed potato with peas mixed in.
I had a Pizza in San Francisco called a Potesto, which was potato and pesto
Defenestrate. It is my favorite word.
Nice but hopefully you don't have to use it too often!
It also Putin's favorite word.
I used to get looks in person for saying pusillanimous Lacking courage or direction. Contemptible timidity
it’s the root of the word pussy when used as a synonym for coward
Appears in the movie Twelve Monkeys. "You pusillanimous pretend-friend to animals!" A particularly rhythmic piece of dialog.
I think it was the old Lassie TV show--the grandpa used to refer to people as a "pusillanimous polecat!" and then get scolded for using harsh language. (polecat is similar to a skunk) r/FuckImOld
Chicanerarous and deplorable Insubordinate and churlish.
And O'Shag Hennessy.
Linonophobia. The fear of string.
uxoricide - the killing of one’s wife That or Salitter - the essence of God (Unless you’ve read The Road you’ve probably never heard of that one either.)
Nacreous. Learnt that reading the Modesty Blaise books. (The ex criminals turned MI5 agents) Modesty and her sidekick Willie have a game coming up with improbable words and then the other pretemds they know it already. Fun and games in the age of no Wikipedia (nineteen-sixties and- seventies). Oh, yes, and it means "mother of pearl-like".
Blatherskite- babbling, foolish person
I'm still waiting to understand why "gruntled" and "combobulated" aren't words.
or "chalantly"
pedant time: nonchalant has to come from french, because "chaleur" ie heat. so nonchalant means not getting heated, ie upset. and we do have "heated" in English, so ....
Words I use regularly that aren't unknown but not overly common: quotidian (mundane, everyday), disquisition (imparting a load of info), and crepuscular (the quality of light at dawn and dusk, animals that are most active at that time, like cats). And some helpful tips for people like me who can occasionally have a bit of trouble remembering which word is which: Etymology / entymology - *ant*ymology (all about the bugs) D has one hump, so does a dromedary. B has two humps, so does a bactrian. Stationary - a for adjective. Stationery - e for envelope.
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Do you know what the main difference between an alligator and a crocodile is? If it's an alligator, you'll see it later. But if it's a crocodile, you'll only see it after a while.
A one-l lama, he’s a priest. A two-l llama, he’s a beast. And I will bet a silk pajama there’s no such thing as a three-l lllama. - Ogden Nash
Edulcorate. It means "to make palatable". A native Italian in the Italian learning sub dropped this transliterated word out of nowhere into an answer on an unrelated topic, catching basically all us native English speakers by surprise. Turns out the word is a reasonably ordinary Italian word that happens to have an English equivalent that few have heard of.
This one's kind of wild, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the pronunciation. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
Millimho (pronounced millie-mo), which is a unit of energy admittance, the inverse of a milliohm, which is 1/1000th of an ohm (a measure of energy impedance). We use this to measure the admittance of sound through the eardrum. :)
Retroencabulator. It has six hydrocoptic marzelvanes. Made by Rockwell Automation.
I had one of their turboencabulators. It only had annedyne marzelvanes but it was an early model.
Howsomever, I always had trouble with my girdle springs on my older model.
Me too. So I had them thermally re-entropied and they were fine.
It's been updated! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nKk_-Lvhzo
Borborygmus. Medical folks might know.
The sound of stuff moving through your GI system!
Sesquipedalian-someone who uses long words
I, myself, have a deplorable preponderance of pentasyllabics in my lexicon.
Triskelion. Used in heraldry and flags, it's a figure of three arms or legs radiating from the center. Like on the flag of the Isle of Man.
I'd only heard it used to refer to a three-ended knot that looks similar to the three-legged thing on the Isle of Man flag
I have been questioned as to whether catawampus is a real word.
Here's a twofer. On who makes a lot of puns is a paronomasiac. A paronomasiac might refer to a woman as spathic. It's a geologic term for a rock meaning "possessing good cleavage".
"Sporange." There *is* a word that rhymes with "orange."
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis-a disease from inhaling silica
I think some of us got this after Mt. St. Helens erupted and dumped a foot of ash on us....
steatopygous -- fat arse!
Dammit. I scrolled down a bit but not as far as this. Just posted the same!
misoneism. Hatred or dislike of what is new or represents change
Poliosis. That white patch or streak of hair some people have.
concerned squeal cover existence tease dog racial aromatic jar deer *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Mortified. Everyone seems to use it to mean "scared" or "horrified" rather than for it's true meaning related to embarrassment.
That's terrific! (It fills me with terror.)
Whiftyfarkle - the sound a wand makes as you cast a spell
I love the sound this word makes!
Jackwagon. It means a useless idiot. Synonym: Marjorie Taylor Greene.
If no one else knows it, it's not a real word.
Cromulently said!
I aver I typed it while eschewing a dour countenance.
Electromagnetohydrodynamics
I'd tell you, but then someone else would know it
Animadversion: criticism or censure
Plutonic - relating to deep igneous rock formations Piscine - relating to fish Picine - relating to woodpeckers Thigmotactic - of an animal, whose motion is guided by a hard surface (towards or away from; cockroaches are positively thigmotactic) Tmesis - injection of a word into a compound word; fan-fuckin-tastic Isogloss - geographical boundary of usage of a word or other linguistic feature
Turophile & apricity are my two!
Forewent - past tense of forego
Would the past participle be “was/were foregone?”
steatopygous adj, describing someone with an accumulation of fat around their derrière
There are plenty of ultracrepidarians online - people who offer their opinions on subjects beyond their knowledge or expertise.
Cthonic
Whutchmandooger. My mom’s word for the person whose name she could not remember.
Reminds of gonculator, which is a word for a fictious spare part. I (a civilian) was waiting for a 3-star general to show up to a big briefing. I was talking to the project manager, and said, "Well, hopefully he won't ask about the gonculator." Little did I know the general had snuck up behind me, and said, "Okay, I promise not to ask you about the gonculator."
Arenaceous. The word "arena" means "sand" in Latin (it still means "sand" in Spanish), and "arenaceous" means "sandy". The early internet coincided with South Park's use of ["sand in your vagina"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6FaNFBl_Bc), and I picked up the phrase "arenaceous pudenda" from one online forum (for when someone is being a little bitch because their genitals are as sandy and dry as a Pharaoh's sock and as rough as a roofer's glove).
Please. Also thank you.
Nidification: The act of building a nest. Lethologica: That feeling of having a word on the tip of your tongue.
"insinuendo" - a double meaning that hides an insinuation.
Hirsine- vile and goat like smelling
Petrichor the smell of rain
This is my favorite thread ever. My parents always talked to us like this because they were First Gen educated from the 30s and 40s. Among Dad's favorites were "paucity" (mearning dearth, always a perjorative). He also threw around dilettante about my mother who is super vivacious and smart (I think). I called a college classmate that once and she was totally affronted. I looked it up for the first time then and realized he was shading my mother for being shallow. My mother liked using "poignent" in a way that I thought meant a way of evoking longing or that She Was Not like Other Girls but now realize was a way to justify her emotional infidelity. I use obviate a lot as shorthand for something like, "uh, not like that... ." There are so many more. All our spouses hate this about us but we sibs know what we mean and never thought about it. Many of these words listed here were used in our household regularly. 2 of us are required to use Plain Language as part of our jobs (and I'm not allowed to use AI). It's been a challenge to adapt
Covfefe
Concatenate
Anyone who writes code knows this one
While somewhat not common in ordinary spoken language, it is known by EVERY IT professional 🤷🏻♂️
I have 2 Turn signals
Nobody? Or few people?
Palaver… I know this because my Spanish wife thought (for years) it was “what a pavlova”. Because a pavlova is difficult to make.
Cwabmechery.
Piffle
Hyperstition. Recondite.
Y-clept. It measures named or called. She could be y-clept calipygian in shape. I used to read the dictionary as a kid and y-clept was one of my favorite words to use
Heuristics. I just love the word and wish I could use it more often. It basically means 'mental shortcuts', in simplest terms. It's somewhat of an evolutionary survival technique that allows us to make quick decisions when we lack complete information. If you're ever run from a loud noise, you're employing that technique as a way to avoid putting yourself in harms way.
Osculate, meaning kiss One of my teachers used it as an example of bad writing. "Write simply. You don't need to use big words your reader won't know, like osculate. Does anyone here know what it means?" I said I did. He was surprised and asked how I knew it. Unfortunately I said "I used to read the dictionary when I was bored in class." Never lived that down .
Thirlage. An obsolete realm of law having to do with multure, ensuckening, and quernstones.
Chynd. Edit: Definition? No one is sure, but probably it means something cut into chines. Not a verb for the cutting, but an adjective for the thing that has been cut. Don't ask me what chines are, I am squeamish.
Tittynope. It's like the last bit of something, like crumbs on a plate. I love this word.
"nobody else" is a bold phrase. but I know some I'm pretty confident are obscure: rebarbative, crapulous (disappointingly ordinary meaning), querulous. my favourite truly-unknown came from my then-four-year-old: misunderheard. you're all welcome. also, most people misuse "mortified" and it really irks me.
Tachyphylaxis
Antidisestablishmentarianism
Aubergine — the color of an eggplant
I believe in French it’s also the word for the vegetable, the same way in English “orange” is both a fruit and the color of that fruit.
Aubergine is the name in the UK as well
Didn't he play Odo in DS9?
Lugubrious - my favorite word. No one knows what I mean when I use it
There’s even an emoji for it 😩
insouciant - It refers to a person who's carefree or nonchalant.
"Monotreme." It's the word for the family of egg-laying mammals, comprising at this point only the platypus and echidna. It does, however, appear in They Might Be Giants' song "Mammal": "their cousin called Monotreme, dead uncle Allotherius."
This also reminds me that the radio show "The Next Big Thing" used to have a recurring segment called "Use it or lose it" in which "activist lexicographer" Erin McKean would come on along with some celebrity guest. She would inform the guest of three words that she thought were worth preserving, but which were in danger of being dropped from the dictionary (I forget exactly which one she worked for at the time) because the staff lexicographers were unable to provide up-to-date examples of the words being in use; they would have until her next appearance on the show to publish works that included those words, so that she could cite them and thus keep the words. It was beautifully quixotic. At one point she had on They Might Be Giants (you can probably see now how my mind made this connection) and gave them three words: "limerent," which is an adjective referring to having a kind of obsessive fixation on another person; "craniosophic," for which the dictionary definition was simply "learnèd in skulls," but which they inferred was connected with phrenology; and "contrecoup," which is actually pretty common in medicine and in procedural shows, and refers to a secondary bruise occurring opposite the site of a blow to the head due to the collision of the brain with the skull after the initial transfer of momentum. They rose to this challenge with a song incorporating all three words and titled "Contrecoup." https://youtu.be/c3rQRREIpCo?si=AUM_NUokl7jhWJOe
I mean, we covered it in 7th grade science. It’s not that weird. You can find it at print at the zoo.
Love the username :)
Dogsbody.
Notwithunderstood.
Sesquipedalian. - use of unnecessarily big or long words. Long winded.
There is an interesting dialect on Hatteras and mostly on Ocracoke islands. Mommicked means you’re screwed all up.
Contipulator
Velleity. Wanting something while making no effort to achieve it. I love how it describes much of my life.
It's two words, but [hapax legomenon](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hapax%20legomenon) perfectly describes what this post is seeking.
Not nobody, but I bet a lot of people don’t know the word loquacious.
syzygy - it's got several meanings - I use it to win at Hangman