Sometimes when writing serious reports or other documents it helps me to try to work in a few interesting words. The game is to find a way to work them in legitimately. Using them as fictitious names is a last resort that should only be adopted if you are really stuck or you know that the people who will read your work are allergic to unusual words.
The table gives my current favourite words and, what I believe is, a brief definition of them. Please let me know any other words which you find amusing to work into your serious writing.
Please be aware that some of the definitions are just indications of
the meaning - CHECK the real meaning before you decide to use it!
| Interesting Word | Simple Definition | ||
| Acaulescent | having a very short stem | ||
| Agrestic | rude, uncultured, coarse | ||
| Aleatory | accidental, chance, occurring randomly | ||
| Banausic | dully mechanical, purely functional or materialistic | ||
| Callipygian | having beautiful or elegantly shaped buttocks | ||
| Casuistry | solving of moral dilemmas by the application of general principles of ethics | ||
| Cenobiotic | pertaining to a community life, as of monks or uni-cellular organisms | ||
| Condign | well deserved or well merited (usually of punishment) | ||
| Confabulate | to chat | ||
| Crepitus | crackling sound from the chest, as of pneumonia patient | ||
| Defenestration | act of throwing someone or something out of a window | ||
| Deipnosophist | one who excels at conversations at the dinner table | ||
| Eleemosynary | relating to charity | ||
|
|
|
||
| Erinaceous | relating to, or resembling, hedgehogs | ||
| Eructation | belching or like an eruption | ||
| Exophagy | the practice, amongst cannibals, of not eating one's relatives or members of one's tribe | ||
| Fescennine | extremely rude, outrageously coarse | ||
| Floccinaucinihilipilification | describing something as worthless (the longest non-technical word in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary) | ||
| Gallinaceous | relating to, or resembling, chickens or pheasants | ||
| Glabrous | smooth and bald | ||
| Inanition | mental or spiritual hollowness | ||
| Lamia | female enchantress or demon | ||
| Logorrhoea | excessive talking | ||
| Oleaginous | oily personality | ||
| Pareidolia | a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus being perceived as significant, e.g. the man in the moon or seeing images in clouds | ||
| Perspicacious | having keen mental perception and understanding | ||
| Pleonasm | use of unnecessary or redundant words, e.g. "see with one's own eyes" | ||
| Sciolism | pretentious superficial knowledge | ||
| Sesquipedalian | using long words | ||
| Steatopygia | development of fatty deposits in the buttocks, as among the Bushmen | ||
| Stegophilist | one who climbs buildings for fun | ||
| Syzygy | alignment of 3 celestial bodies in a straight line | ||
| Tatterdemalion | a person wearing ragged or tattered clothing; a ragamuffin | ||
| Tmesis | separation of the parts of a word by another word, e.g. abso-bloody-lutely |
