It’s confession time for your favorite word-nerd:

Last week, “Weird Words” contained a spelling error — all the worse because it wasn’t a casual typo in the text, but rather one of the actual terms on that list: the Nahuatl tlatchli, which I spelled wrong by transposing the “t” and “ch” (tlachtli).

This gaffe won’t come as a shock to anyone who knows how scatterbrained I can be; but it is more than a little ironic, since we were celebrating one Shrey Parikh — the California teen who won May’s 98th Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.

So as I resolve to avoid that sort of thing henceforth, I’ll remind readers that Parikh’s win occurred in a final tie-breaking round — when the 14-year-old triumphed by correctly spelling 32 words in 90 seconds.

Parikh’s winning list offered so many outliers that we managed only half a dozen last week. Here are more:

Cywyddau (noun) – This is the plural of cywydd (KEH-with) — a complicated type of Welsh poetry; among other things, it involves a form of rhyme and alliteration that provides yet another truly weird word: cynghanedd (keng-HA-neth).

So you see that when a Welsh word ends with dd, it often sounds more like th. It’s my understanding that this goes for Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd, best known for the title role in TV’s Hornblower (1998-2003) — though he also played Fifth Officer Harold Lowe in James Cameron’s Titanic.

Fais-dodo (fay-DOE-doe, noun) – A country dance party held on Saturdays in southern Louisiana — not the sort of word that comes up often in conversation! Merriam-Webster explains the etymology: “from French (baby-talk) fais dodo! go to sleep!; probably from the fact that small children who attend the dances are expected to go to sleep during the festivities.”

Melengket (noun) – We’re going down the rabbit-hole on this one:

When I googled the word, the first thing that came up was in a foreign language — not one I even recognized. So then I googled that and found it was Indonesian. And when the dust settled, I finally dug up melengket at merriam-webster.com: “a soft Manila copal gathered about two weeks after the trees have been tapped.”

But … I didn’t know copal either! So I had to look that up as well — at which point, I felt a hard-copy dictionary might help me find a bottom to the hole. And thus, per the recent but reliable Microsoft Encarta Dictionary, copal is “a hard resin obtained from various tropical trees. Use: making varnish.”

As for the pronunciation of melengket: You can do your own rabbit-dive for that one; I couldn’t find it. (So how on earth did a 14-year-old know how to spell the word? Sheesh!)

Retiarius (ree-shee-AIR-ee-us, noun) – A Roman gladiator who carries a trident — and a net to throw over opponents. (Rete- is Latin for “net.”)

Sawder (SAW-dur, noun) – Flattery or compliments — often used in the phrase “soft sawder”; can be a verb as well (“to flatter”). The venerable and exhaustive Collins indicates this is a variant of solder — tied, I assume, to the softness and malleability of that material.

Tessaraconter (tess-uh-ruh-KON-tur, noun) – Ancient galley — a rowed ship, like the kind in Ben-Hur — with 40 sets of oars. (Related to the better-known tetra-, tesser- is a Greek base meaning “four” — though some sources indicate it can also mean 40.)

Uayeb (WYE-eb, noun) – Again from M-W: “a period consisting of five nameless days added to a tun to make the 365-day year of the Maya calendar.” A tun is normally a unit of measure — 252 gallons, to be precise; but curiously enough, M-W has no additional definition of that word related to the calendar. A-I tells us that a tun = 360 days — and that it “serves as a central building block in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.”

Another word you probably won’t be using at your next party; but at least you know how to spell it.

I hope.