12 Feb, 2009
Posted by: robertstevenson In: Grammar posts| Interesting stuff| Writing
How many words are in your vocabulary? The average high school graduate is said to know about 10,000 words. The average 4-year college graduate is said to know about 20,000 words. Do you have room for any more words in your vocabulary?
Here are some interesting words, which you may not know.
Upon learning an interesting word, [...]
Find the moving circle.
07 Apr, 2008
Posted by: robertstevenson In: Fun stuff
FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION/flɒksɪˌnɔːsɪˌnɪhɪlɪˌpɪlɪfɪˌkeɪʃn/
The action or habit of judging something to be worthless.
Back in the eighteenth century, Eton College had a grammar book which listed a set of words from Latin which all meant “of little or no value”. In order, those were flocci, nauci, nihili, and pili (which sound like four of the seven dwarves, Roman version, [...]
EPEOLATRY
The worship of words.
Though an appropriate term for this forum, it hasn’t achieved any great success in the world at large. It’s not even especially old, since its first known user, and presumably its creator, was Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his Professor at the Breakfast Table of 1860: “Time, time only, can gradually wean [...]
CATOPTROMANCY
Divination by means of mirrors.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who is the fairest of them all?” At some time or other, almost anything you can think of has been used to foretell the future, from straws on a red-hot iron to disembowelled chickens. But the mirror, that most strange thing that allows not only [...]
Abacot: This word is said not to exist.
Generations of reference books once included this term, including the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannia, dated 1771: “the name of an ancient cap of state worn by the kings of England, the upper part whereof was in the form of a double crown”.
The word’s origin was a [...]
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