Last week, Webb’s Weird Words trotted out one of our standard oddball vocabulary lists — this one including succedanea (suck-suh-DAY-nee-yuh). The plural form of a noun meaning “substitute” — especially a replacement medicine — it’s perhaps best known from a brief appearance in Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy Waiting for Godot. Now more than 70 years old,
According to Merriam-Webster online, the English language contains roughly one million words — though that tally includes “myriad names of chemicals and other scientific entities.” Furthermore, this site — which offers lots of other cool info besides just meanings — also points out that there’s considerable disagreement on the actual total; as an example, even
Here at Webb’s Weird Words, oddball vocab is our stock-in-trade. Articles on these usually come from my sprawling list of terms encountered in my nonstop reading. But lately, we haven’t done many of these randomly chosen selections; this is due in part to busyness, but also to thematic groupings — like “sailing words,” in honor
If you’ve missed Weird Words these past couple of weeks — well, Weird Words has missed you too. It’s only busy-ness that’s kept our vocabulary studies on hiatus; but here at last, we’re ready to conclude our three-part look at the works and words of Patrick O’Brian. He’s the author behind the beloved Aubrey-Maturin novels
Last week, Webb’s “Weird Words” celebrated a major milestone with our 100th vocabulary column. That somewhat self-indulgent piece comprised a description of my weekly writing process; but it also mentioned another recent milestone: Sometime in the past month or so, the running master-doc—the one from which I draw my lists each week—managed to cross 3,000
Last week, Webb’s Weird Words attempted an April Fools’ column consisting entirely of made-up words. No idea how many readers fell for that — but my spurious list included one whimsical monetary unit: the fictitious praq, supposedly used in the fake former Soviet republic, “Ziurtzybad.” Now if you swallowed that one, don’t feel bad; “praq”
