I was listening to Cat Eye Willie Claims his Lover by Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer, a rather literate murder ballad. According to the lyrics on the official site, the song contains the lyrics:

And he has stolen ruttle, horse, and bridle
And taken to the cullion road alone."Cullion" is an interesting word in itself; it is apparently the English ( Read more... )

forhooie (v), also forhow, forhoo: to despise

found it when searching for words with five consecutive vowels (for the curious, the collins scrabble wordlist contains the following:
cooeeing
euouae
euouaes
forhooieing
miaoued
miaouing
queueing
queueings
zoaeae
zooeae
)

'Cant' in the sense of 'edge' or 'border'. I was reading a journal of a voyage to the Arctic whaling-grounds in the 1830s, in which the author describes his ship 'as running down the cant of the ice'. At first I thought this might be a term that the British whalers had picked up from their Dutch colleagues, 'kant' in this sense be a very common ( Read more... )

'Grist' is corn which is brought to a mill for grinding (c.f. 'gristing' as a verb for grinding); the word has survived in the phrase 'grist to one's mill', but I wonder how many people who use it realize what it means.

Hello im new, and i found an unusual word, Incarnadine, means flesh colored.

Nepenthes - a 'drug' given to forget unpleasant memories

The word - commonly found as nepenthe, lacking its final letter - is otherwise solely poetic or literary.

Of or pertaining to fireflies and glow-worms.

Not, perhaps, a really exotic word, since the category of "words pertaining to an animal's character" is a long one, but a pretty word.

It's not quite on topic, but I've just discovered Paul McFedries' fascinating WordSpy site where he catalogues neologisms with good contextual citations. The site has an RSS feed, and it appears here as wordspy_rss.

I know "anachronism" means (more or less) born in the wrong century.

Is there a word that roughly means "born in the wrong country"?

crwth \KROOTH (rhymes with “booth”)\ noun

: an ancient Celtic stringed instrument that is plucked or bowed

Example sentence:
“He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn, all night long.” (Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood)

"Crwth" is the Welsh name for an ancient Celtic instrument that is similar to a violin. In Middle English ( Read more... )