Most hardcover English dictionaries offer something like a quarter of a million words.

The excellent American Heritage, currently in its fifth edition, comes closer to 400,000—while the fascinating but idiosyncratic Collins now carries over 700,000 entries.

Which is my way of saying that even though Webb’s “Weird Words” has now reached its 69th installment, we won’t be done anytime soon. My own running list of oddball vocab now stands at exactly 2600, and I’m about to add a dozen more from recent reading.

Here’s a brand-new selection from that sprawling document:

Chinquapin (CHING-kuh-pin, noun) – A dwarf chestnut tree, or the nut thereof. Probably a Native American term—Algonquian, to be specific.

Culm (culm, noun) – Dust or other waste from coal-mining—known colloquially in the industry as slack.

Can also indicate a (usually) jointed or hollow grass stem, which Merriam-Webster identifies as monocotyledonous. Phew! I’m not even gonna try to pronounce that one. And its definition—involving embryos, organs & flowers, while also including the term angiospermous—is pretty challenging too.

Emprosthotonos (em-pross-THAWT-uh-nuss, noun) – Again from Merriam-Webster—because a lot of other dictionaries don’t have this word: “a tetanic spasm in which the head and feet are brought forward toward each other and the back arched.” When I googled this, the search-engine came up with an image which looks mighty uncomfortable.

Tetanic, incidentally, is from tetanus, a condition against which nearly all of us have been immunized; and it does indeed involve these sorts of painful spasms and convulsions.

OK—enough hard science from an English teacher; I’m feeling out of my depth!

Jugulate (JUG-yuh-late, verb) – A now-obsolete word meaning to kill by cutting the throat. So of course that’s related to jugular—the vein in your neck that essentially takes blood from the head to the heart.

Now in case we seem to be straying back into science: Jug- is a Latin base that can also be spelled junct-. Meaning “to join,” it has given us the word above (in the sense of joining brain and body), along with many others—including junction, joint, rejoin and conjugate.

Pluvial (PLOO-vee-ul, adjective) – Having to do with rain. According to the terrific Random House College Dictionary, it can also be styled as pluvious.

Etymologically, it is related to flow, which is actually a fairly similar word if you keep in mind P and F are both made with the lips; hence the F sound of words like phone and phobia. (Pronouncing W and V likewise involves the lips.)

Shambolic (sham-BALL-ick, adjective) – Meaning “completely disorganized” or “chaotic” (Collins), this informal British term is essentially the adjective form of shambles (as in, “This room is a shambles! Don’t you ever clean in here?!”).

On a mildly interesting trivia note: Before it meant a general mess, shambles was initially a term for a slaughterhouse or butchery. Naturally, it acquired its broader and better-known meaning from the frequent messiness of these places in olden times.

And if your yard it starting to look like one at this cold and blustery time of year, get out there with your rake—before something pluvial comes along to make it way too wet and heavy!