List of Great or Exotic Words

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dblteam

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I suspect it's just as bad for a writer to dumb down their vocabulary as it is to force the use of "big" words.

I'd say two-thirds of the words on Alaskamatt's fiction lists are words I consider part of my vocabulary, meaning I could use them correctly on the spur of the moment. Most of the others I'd heard of, but couldn't have used correctly if someone had said, "use <blank> in a sentence".

So I would use those words (my 2/3 of the list) in my writing without a second thought, and I don't think readers would be turned off by the vocabulary. (We'll leave whether they'd be turned off by the writing to a different discussion :) ) I hope no one would feel compelled to pick up a dictionary (unless they like that kind of thing), but I don't think I, as a writer, ought to be overly concerned with the audience's vocabulary. After all, I learned my vocabulary from reading because most of the books I read had a few words in them that I didn't know. Using those words in my own writing helps perpetuate the process.

Valerie

Oh, and my favorite word is "esoteric". Followed closely by "synergy".
 

inexperiencedinker

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alaskamatt17 said:
Tad Williams is a really good writer. Which books of his did you read? I liked the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, but Otherland was good, too.

It was otherworld. I think trying to keep the world alive (which was technologically advanced) the insanely smart characters, and the BIG descriptive words just became too much for me. I whole heartedly agree with using a word that has better meaning and depth...shuffle instead if walk....that kind of thing, but his felt too forced and too often for me. Periodically, 'walks' works just fine for me!
 

Mistook

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Macabre is pronounced like Ma-kob' (like bob) or Ma-kob'-ra (like candelabra) either one is right, but I use the first way. I remeber hearing that word on TV a lot when I was a kid. "Family Classics presents the macabre tale of..."


Here are the other ones mentioned so far that are in my vocabulary, and how they got there.


arboreal (arbor day, I live near an arboretum)

aspersion (to "cast aspersions" - that's a common enough cliche')

attenuate (mixing board term - every knob is an attenuator - I was in a few rock bands)

catharsis (fairly common psycho-babble term)

contrail (buzzword from the 60's, often used by my dad)

corpulent (don't know how that got into my vocabulary)

flue (mary poppins and any other movie with a fireplace in it)

irascible (grade school vocab word - liked the sound of it)

latent (also overused in psycho-babble - my aunt is an armchair psychologist BTW)

ligature (CSI / Law & Order word)

putative (Must've listened to too much NPR when I picked that one up!)
 

Mistook

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There are some words I'll never remember the meaning of no matter how many times I hear them because they just don't sound like what they mean.
"enervated" is one of those. It sound like you're full of energy, but it means the opposite. "Lugubrious" is another one. It sounds like you're all giddy and happy, but it means just the opposite.

"I feel quite enervated and lugubrious! Let's go for a bike ride!"
 

Albedo of Zero

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alaskamatt17 said:
albedo -- the fraction of incident electromagnetic radiation reflected by a surface, especially of a celestial body


hey! i resemble that!
 

alaskamatt17

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Lugubrious should have been on my list! I just read that word in Foundation and Empire a week or so ago. I guess I forgot to add it.
 

alaskamatt17

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I just saw this word in a post by another AW member, and I know it's outside my usage vocabulary, so I thought I'd add it.

torrid -- intensely hot; passionate; parched by the sun; scorching; hurried/rapid

Seems like a good word to me.
 

Mistook

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alaskamatt17 said:
I just saw this word in a post by another AW member, and I know it's outside my usage vocabulary, so I thought I'd add it.

torrid -- intensely hot; passionate; parched by the sun; scorching; hurried/rapid

Seems like a good word to me.


That's another one that's most often heard in the hackneyed phrase, "Torrid love affair."
 

Enigma

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An interesting thought

Hi! I normally reside next door, in the screen writer's cell block, but thought I'd look in on you guys before they find me and take me back.

As a reporter, I've interviewed several authors and noticed that they don't speak the way they write, meaning they, excluding Wm. Buckley and that crowd, don't use "big" words. Kind of makes me think most of 'em use a thesaurus - a lot.
 

britwrit

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Sometimes, just sometimes, French is useful...

esprit d'escalier - "the spirit of the stairs" - Not directly translatable but it roughly means the regret you feel after missing the opportunity for a perfect retort or when you come up with it an hour too late.

réchauffé - warmed over leftovers, often meant in the sense of reworked literary material
 

Sharon Mock

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Lacustrine made it into my onomasticon (book of names -- in my case, an Excel database). I doubt I'd ever use it as an actual word, but it goes so well with words like argiope and chalcedony and girasol that could be used, in the proper context, as character names. (I have a whole class of names like this in my WIP.)

I have a list of "found words" in there as well -- words that are too good not to remember, even if I never find a purpose for them. It's still short:

barleychild -- a baby born less than six months after marriage
labefaction -- decline in public morality and social order
scabland -- tract of high, rocky land with no topsoil and dry streambeds
solfatara -- level area surrounding volcano emitting vapors

Mmmmm. Words.
 

alaskamatt17

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Words really are our most basic of tools. I can never resist adding a new word to my vocabulary. You never know when it might come in handy.
 

Steve 211

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I used to make a mark in the dictionary by words I looked up, and if I had to look it up twice, I'd write out the definition. Then I'd make sentences out of the words, to help remember them. Like, "The hirsuite barleychild with the irascible bole caused labefaction in the corpulent albedo."

I had a stack of these pages half an inch thick, and in the end I threw them all out. Why? 'Cause I could never remember them all, they made me sound like someone else, and they choked up my writing like dead leaves on a sewer grate.

Also, I started Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes," once, and it was a great novel, real funny, but I couldn't get past the third chapter because he used four or five huge words a page. It was like eating a crabmeat sandwich and finding a piece of shell every other bite.

Some words, though, are good just to know. Like ubiquitous (appearing everywhere), or your enervate - there's a funny scene in Streisand's "The Owl and the Pussycat" with a writer and her discussing that word. "It doesn't mean what you think it does!"

So I'm with GP: "The common word used in an uncommon way; that's a treat to read."

And by the way, GP, "a Scrabble-winning nugget out of nowhere" ? Someone's gotta use that in a story: He came into town, a Scrabble-winning nugget out of nowhere...

 

Kallahan

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Had a friend of mine who wanted me to review his poem, to me it looked like he went through a thusarous just looking for the most complex and obscure words possible. I told him his poem was terrible and he needed to lighten his diction. He responed "I'm trying to convey and idea!", I told him his words were failing miserably at that. How can you convey a thought or idea with words nobody understands?
 

BlueTexas

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Honestly, I love to come across new words in a novel, as long as they are well suited enough to the context I can keep reading. I'll look it up later, but context is key here.

There is a limit. Some of those words in the first post sound like the author was pontificating purely to be a flexer-of-the-word muscle.

Lugubrious is one of my favorite funny-tasting words.

I love common words in uncommon ways. Wicked by Gregory Macguire did that several times.
 

reph

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U.S. usage for loquax: The American Heritage Dictionary gives the spelling "draft" for all uses (air current, military conscription – everything) and lists "draught" as a variant, "chiefly Brit." The board game, however, is draughts, but we usually call it checkers.

Despite the dictionary, it seems natural to me to use the spelling "draught" for just two senses: noun, a swallow of beer; adjective, identifying a horse used for drayage.

__________________________________________

It's not a wasteland. It's arboreally challenged real estate.
 

Mistook

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Not that I'm a fan of putting big words into narrative fiction (I try to keep it pretty basic) but I do wonder what's going to happen to all these words if nobody uses them.

I used to have more time to listen to NPR during the day, and I recall some of these talk show guests were just shamelessly going out of their way to phrase things in the most obscure terms. On the one hand, I was impressed, because they always used the thesaurus words flawlessly - always the right shade of meaning, and never too many strung together.

But on the other hand I felt a real sense of disgust, knowing the guy could've put it so much more plainly and simply. Obviously these people were trying to keep up some kind of barrier to ward off the common folk from listening in.

But why should that even be possible? Words are one of the few things in the world that are truly free. How have they become the significator of expensive educations? I'm positive that my gramma had twice my vocabulary, and though she was an english teacher, she wasn't Ivy League by any stretch. She was just a poor daughter of an Irish immigrant.

I guess I have her influence to thank for the fact that I can decipher most of what I hear on NPR - even though I never made it through community college. Big words were flying all over the house when I was a kid. To a great extent, I've had to "learn" to dumb down my speech and writing to a level that's considered "normal" and even these days, when normal is second nature, I still get called out once in a while as being some kind of school-head.

It's just strange to me. Why are we losing these words?
 

Steve 211

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Speaking arboreally, I was reading today a bit by a British environmentalist about how when he was a kid he'd be out climbing trees all day. Towards the end of the essay he wrote, "I've been a committed dendrophile ever since."

This was a great use of a big word because you know what it means from context, and it's used in a humorous way.

I remember another book, though, that started off saying that the main character was "a noctumbulist gamin." I had to get out of the chair, grab a dictionary, look them up, and wonder why the heck he didn't just say, "He was a sleepwalking street kid."
 
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Maybe people who use 'big' words in fiction do so because they know the meaning and assume the reader does too,? Instead of saying the author was showing off or warding off the less intelligent reader, it would be better to look up the definition of the word and use it as an opportunity to increase your own vocabulary. I already knew the meanings of a lot of the words already mentioned, in fact, use them in speech and writing quite a lot and I wouldn't 'dumb down' my vocabulary to suit the reader, just as I wouldn't beef it up with certain words, just as dblteam said. It all depends on context. Those 'big' words exist because there is a need for them. Sometimes arboreal works better than tree-like or saying a creature lives in trees. There seems to be a kind of reverse snobbery to using 'big' (i.e. unknown to the reader) words. Just because a few people don't know the definition, is no reason to dumb down your writing. It would be an insult to most readers' intelligence to stick to monosyllabic words.
 

SJB

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Hear, hear, scarletpeaches!

Much as I love Hemingway, I was ever a Faulkner girl. Readers should delight in ten-dollar words. If they're afraid of nicely nuanced writing, they can stick to "The Da Vinci Code," and welcome.
 

Mike Martyn

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What about the joy of regional slang? "Scokum" is a wonderful North West coast term from one of the old aboriginal trade languages that made its way into local English. It means very good.


Example: "Pretty scokum rig for a gypo outfit like this!" (one logger talking to another)

Translation: Your logging truck is way too fancy for this two bit logging company.
 

alaskamatt17

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Regional words are great, too. They help add realism to your setting, and they're usually easy enough to figure out in context, expecially if they're used multiple times.

I used the word visquene in one of my stories and was surprised to find that it wasn't in the MS Word dictionary. I looked online, and it wasn't in the www.dictionary.com index either. I finally found in a dictionary of uncommon words by searching google, but I hear people use the word all the time here in Alaska (it's the name of those thick plastic sheets they use to cover pallets for shipping).
 
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I had a Canadian and an English friend for dinner last night (not in the Hannibal Lecter sense) and had fun teaching them Scottish slang..!
 

Mike Martyn

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scarletpeaches said:
I had a Canadian and an English friend for dinner last night (not in the Hannibal Lecter sense) and had fun teaching them Scottish slang..!


Lang may your lum reek!
 
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It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht!

I also explained the meanings of Jack (or Jill) the biscuit, 'minger', 'honking' and 'bogging'. A good time was had by all, and they like my spaghetti Bolognese too.:D
 
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