Words that deserve wider use
wordwarriors.wayne.edu
wordwarriors.wayne.edu
Personally, I revel in these words, even if I never get to use them. Coming across a specialized term for something that was previously nameless feels like receiving a present, something to treasure.
This in fact explains why so many groups fail to communicate clearly!
One that surprised me is “agog” - I know it well, but I have literally only seen it as “agog with …” with the blank often being “excitement,” but now I learned that that’s a superfluous use of words, as agog already means just that.
But all that said, it’s a fun list. Thanks for sharing it!
I've never seen it used that way; I've only seen it used like "They were all agog at x..."
Seriously though if you want a read something by an author who really went for it and used maybe 75-85% of this list, get a copy of the Gormenghast series of books by Mervyn Peake. Just don’t come blaming me afterwards that you lost a chunk of your time.
If I have to look a word up in a dictionary that is often the fault of the writer, too.
Word lists like this are gatekeeping understanding. What’s more fun are those words used by some groups a lot, but not widely known. I was reminded of this when walking down a road in London and seeing a TfL sign that read “This is a temporary bus stop in use whilst repairs are made to the nearby permanent bus stop”. Most non-Brits have never used or heard the word “whilst”, and yet it’s used all the time in the U.K.
There are more fun words out there too for which no English translations exist, but we should totally make mainstream English. I won’t list as there are so, so many… glad hygge is doing well in the U.K. though.
>If I have to look a word up in a dictionary that is often the fault of the writer, too.
And when should I freeze my vocabulary and declare that all the words I haven't yet memorized are worthless? At the age of seven? Perhaps twelve?
We have always been at war with David Foster Wallace.
Genius. My hat, Sir.
Of course they do. Unless you're suggesting that there's some kind of deep state conspiracy to alter the English language one word at a time.
>and using words that most people don't understand works against that goal
Most people don't speak much English at all. Should everyone stop using all but the most common thousand words? Most native speakers aren't experts in any particular field. Should all technical writing spend dozens of words to imprecisely replace each bit of specific jargon? Should no one ever coin a new term simply because it won't already be in wide use?
Not at all. There’s an entirely democratic process used to decide which words are commonly used an understood, everybody simply chooses for themselves what words are useful for them to include in their vocabulary.
> Most people don't speak much English at all.
I wasn’t specifically talking about English. My comments would apply to any non-dead language.
Regarding the rest of your comment, people modify languages all the time. They invent new words or bring old ones into use (or stop using old ones), and whether they survive depends entirely upon how popular they are within the culture. This isn’t specific to the broader English speaking culture either, subcultures have their own vocabularies whether they are technical subcultures, or some music subculture, or zoomer meme culture… they all invent vocabularies to suit their communication needs.
A better title for this page would be “a list of (mostly) discarded words that I (we?) like”. In regards to how effective these words are at facilitating communication, I see no argument presented here for why they get less recognition or use than they deserve. Because most English speakers wouldn’t understand most of these words, and using a word that somebody doesn’t understand is always going to be a less effective way of communicating with them than using a word that they do (and all of the words I saw on that list have actually widely understood alternatives).
> entirely democratic process
Yup. Language change theory. Via emergent consensus, the most democratic process.
Good writing is about expressing and transferring ideas. It is not supposed to be intellectual masturbation, though some may treat it as such.
Not everything is a scientific paper. Good writing can also be art. There's a reason why Shakespeare wrote his 18th sonnet and not just "I think you're very beautiful".
I didn't say it was. I said that writing is about expressing transferring ideas.
>Good writing can also be art.
True. And good art is about... expressing and transferring ideas.
The idea a fiction text such as Shakespeare's works wants to express is (mainly) emotional.
The exact meaning of words is more important in the former case than the latter, though not unimportant in the latter.
Shakespeare is one of the biggest outliers when it comes to reach as a function of complexity of language, and I don't think that generalizing from that specific anecdote is useful, especially as pertains to modern writers. I wouldn't advise any new writers to imitate Shakespeare if they want to be published today.
It's very easy to get published today, I just got published and so did you.
But sure, your advice is probably good if you are concerned mainly with commercial success. I would venture to guess, though, that most great, enduring writing comes from something inside the writer that they feel they have to express, rather than from looking outside themselves for the right "product-market fit." Some writers find a simple, lapidary style, others prefer more ornate language. Both can be great and I don't think we should call one right and one wrong.
The more I think about it, I'm not sure how language would even develop in the first place if this were true.
The way I learned to write was by scouring the related words in the Thesaurus to find the closest word to convey the feeling I had.
Isn't every new word learned and invented using a similar process?
I'm just imagining the first ancient human inventing a word for "wolf" and another member of the tribe silently thinking to themselves that this overly intellectual showoff is just gatekeeping, but sadly can't express his thoughts without physicaly lashing out.
Having a wide vocabulary is like having a well stocked tool box, you take out the most approximate tool for the job.
English is such a hodgepodge of languages and so with such a multitude of ways to express the same idea, that it is a shame to not use that full range where appropriate.
Expecting everyone to speak at and express themselves at the lowest common denominator feels like gate keeping to understanding personally.
Many exceptions exist. Jargon should be used in a professional context. Archaic language helps to set stories in the past. Your point may be enjoying the complexity of speech. For example, Terry Pratchett would not be Terry Pratchett without excessive footnotes. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun was loved in part for words like those in https://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=WolfeWiki.Obsc....
But exceptions are exceptions because they are exceptional. Most of what we say is not exceptional.
You say that expressing yourself in simple language "feels like gate keeping to understanding personally."
I find the opposite. Complex language often hides muddled thinking. It takes work to clarify my thoughts into simple language. Once I have done so, my understanding becomes more precise. Therefore my thinking has been improved by trying to speak simply.
Especially in technical writing. Something like “the flange of a train wheel”, while flange is an uncommon word you may have to look up, you’ll be left knowing exactly what I’m talking about in a way that generic terms wouldn’t.
John McPhee, Draft No. 4
However, as a writer, you can use rare words if you give enough contextual hints.
For example: "His personality was itself a gamble. You could never predict his famous bouts of bliss. Beware mercurial people like that."
It's kind of telling that King, whose writing nobody has ever accused of being high art, is saying this. Don't get me wrong, I like King, but using obscure words is a valid artistic choice.
Right, and no musician should use any notes from outside the pentatonic scale.
This sounds like Bill Gates "640K ought to be enough for anybody".
I suspect that the unstated preface of King's aphorism was, "If you want to maximize book sales".
But I don’t think it applies everywhere, or even where I operate.
I want to communicate clearly. So using a precise word is valuable.
I, and many people I interact with, actually like looking up words and learning things. So it’s a feature not a bug to learn a new word when reading someone’s message.
Of course not everyone is the same, so it boils down to “know your audience.”
There are as many styles and motivations as there are writers. All are inherently valid. Whether they serve specific goals is a separate consideration. If you want to write horror like Stephen King, listen to Stephen King until you develop your own voice.
This feels like it would still mean the exact same thing if "while" were used instead of "whilst". I have no idea if there's some subtle difference in British English or if they're just synonyms with very close spelling to each other, but it doesn't strike me as particularly profound.
Although it's fairly certain most Americans won't understand "cyberdisinhibitionism", "consanguineous", "antidisestablishmentarianism", or "insouciance" without additional context, some people's "~50k innate concepts" can receive an adjuvant through performative, logorrheic elucidation. The idiom "a word to the wise" implies the property that sharper instruments require less explanation to make the connection, while most others need a little more assistance.
And there are multilingual people who engage in loaning and coining words. Furthermore, the question of counting colloquialisms like "hangry" muddies the water.
So there is no clever rule except to write to the anticipated audience be it a PhD dissertation in cosmology, an article for "The Atlantic", or a children's bedtime stories for 8-year-olds.
What it lacks is some context/flavor. Does the word sound British or American? Does it sound old-fashioned? funny? sarcastic? As a non-native English speaker, with many of these words – even if I knew their meaning – I can't really tell without further research,
Also, the word "Absquatulate" ("to discreetly leave a gathering or party without informing the host") may be obscure, but I'd argue that's because it was replaced by the term "Irish goodbye".
(The nice and frustrating thing about English is that ultimately there are no rules. There’s no Academy sitting on a throne deciding how billions of English users speak and write — but on the flip side, nobody can fix the catastrophic spelling of this language either.)
There are some very useful words in this list, but I kinda wish they were ordered by some metric for usefulness rather than alfabetically.
I guess ordering them by popularity would kinda defeat the purpose though...
Civil debate, people take turns and listen to each other; Anecdoche. everybody talks at once, nobody listens.
I've been a reader | writer | speaker of commonwealth English for decades, this has the feel of a list of words less familiar to American English speakers; there are a few words I've not come across - most might feature in an episode of Have I Got News for You (panel programm that rips and riffs on contemporary UK news events) or other chatty talkfests.
definitions: Open to debate (adj.). Having no legal significance (n.).
And even when searched in Google I get...
1. subject to debate, dispute, or uncertainty. 2. having little or no practical relevance, typically because the subject is too uncertain to allow a decision.
Am I wrong here? I always looked at moot as not mattering. But if it is open for debate, then does it not still matter? To me, moot means no worth debating any longer.
I wonder if the "open to debate" meaning is an older one that's fallen out of use, or used in certain technical fields (e.g. law), or depends on geography (e.g. British).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mootness
Seems like the word could be classified as a contronym in some sense.
It seems like a third each are just relatively modern French or Latin words pronounced in an English manner; of little interest to people who know Roman languages, but then there are the remaining third of “real” English words which seems to come out of a mirror world and are delightful! Mogshade, mollycoddle, mugwump, …
I recently read a book by Charles Stross in the Laundry Files series. part of the book took place in the 1850s somewhere, (I think). It was filled with words and slang I didn't know. Presumably Stross did some research on English back in those days.
In a completely different context, I have read various letters that date from somewhere 1800 somewhere 1930s. More on the older side.
I am surprised by how eloquent they were. Thet had a much larger vocabulary than we see these days. I think helped by snail mail being a bit more formal and a lot slower process than banging away and emailing on a laptop. It gave the writer more time and more impetus to the writing process.
It may be skewed by the fact that the leter are mostly from the upper middle class.
About 10% of the list are actively used. Rest are stuffy.
Some of them, however, combine being rare, accessible and not easily replaced by other words. For example, calumny, copious and crux. I wish to see those words having wider use, as they would be handy to express concepts that generally require longer sentences to get across.
Erudite to a fault.
Was disappointed. But you’re not.
If I use words like “bildungsroman,” I significantly lower my chances of success because you are much more likely to stop reading or make a bad assumption about my meaning than you are to appreciate my cleverness and look for your thesaurus.
Ironically, this comment uses “bildungsroman” to make its point because I know you don’t know what it means (me neither) but that’s rare craftsmanship:)
The goal of a writer shouldn't be to confuse their readers or make them feel dumb, but they also shouldn't sacrifice a perfectly fitting word that 90% of the audience understands for a weaker substitute that 100% understand.
I often look up words when reading. Sometimes new words, and sometimes words I have a rough understanding of but am curious about their dictionary definition. I almost never see as the author's failure or mine.
Many of the words in this list I've never seen before, but I don't think that means they should necessarily be discarded. And I wouldn't want writers to avoid words like bowdlerize, vestigial, avuncular, defenestrate, palimpsest or sinecure just because they could be replaced by a more common word or phrase that means almost the same thing.
I’m all for writers using whatever word is appropriate and if I need to use a dictionary then that’s a win for me, I learned a new word.
Use better words. Teach me. :)
I kissed her and told her "One of the things I love about you is your casual ability to use words like 'perambulate' in sentences."
She's a peripatetic with speech tending toward the sesquipedalian.
There is this fabulous term in Dutch for railway tracks that have deformed by thermal stress (endangering the trains) that basically begs to be used metaphorically. As of yet I have not found myself in a conversation that requires its use. I am afraid it is one of those once in a lifetime words.
Also: chatoyance n. Having the property of variable luster or reflection like a cat's eye.
The rest of us will have more fun.
Now all I need is to know how to pronounce it
Edit:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agelast
Aj - eh - last
One who never laughs
No, I didn't read the whole thing that far, I just scrolled around.
captious
kăp′shəs
adjective
1. Marked by a disposition to find and point out trivial faults.
2. Intended to entrap or confuse, as in an argument.