As Webb’s “Weird Words” hits its 15th installment, here’s a personal question for vocab-loving readers: Just how many words do you think you know? For that matter, how many words does the English language actually have? Wanna take a guess before I tell you? Well, various online sources indicate the average American is familiar with
We are at No. 14 in these ongoing columns about oddball vocabulary; so here are 14 more weird words for your week. These are, incidentally, all nouns unless otherwise noted; and since most have fairly instinctive pronunciation, I left that out too, except where needed. Arsole – While it sounds indecent and is not listed
By Joseph W. Smith III Last week’s “Weird Words” marked installment No. 12; so I took those two digits as a theme and picked out several goodies from pages 1 and 2 of my ever-growing oddball vocabulary list. But I got only halfway through that selection before running out of space. Here is the other
By Joseph W. Smith III Last week, I celebrated the 10th “Weird Words” column with a selection of 10-letter terms. Having thus observed my minor milestone, this week’s installment is devoted to something without which I could never do these pieces: the English dictionary. Back in pre-internet days, when folks always needed books or libraries
For me it was a glorious day in May when I emailed Steph Nordstrom — my estimable editor at Webb — with what I considered a long-shot: I was pitching a weekly column on oddball vocab words. To my everlasting joy, Steph okayed the idea without hesitation — telling me she’d read the dictionary just
In our last two installments, Webb’s Weird Words focused mostly on terms from medicine and India, as I was honoring Abraham Verghese’s current bestseller The Covenant of Water, which revolves around those two subjects. This week, we’re back in random mode: I simply pulled up the first of the 26 pages in my oddball vocab
