Worthless Word for the Day.

October 21, 2002 1:13 PM

Worthless Word for the Day. Ever feel as if an "obscure, abstruse and/or recondite word" was forced into a newspaper/magazine/quote? Now there's a site that finally finds and provides wwftd! Impress your friends.
posted by geoff. (13 comments total)

Oh man, what a great site -- thanks, geoff! (I was a bit let down on scanning the complete word list to find relatively common and useful, thus boring, words like "abattoir" and "addlepate," but most of them are satisfyingly worthless.)
posted by languagehat at 1:28 PM on October 21, 2002

WWFTD?

What Would the Financial Times Do?
posted by kickingtheground at 1:55 PM on October 21, 2002

Whoo-hoo! I love this site!
posted by grrarrgh00 at 1:57 PM on October 21, 2002

Style points for the way paging works in the word list. To get past the first page, you have to click the link "Discontinue (not)"!

There are quite a few words in the list I've seen in texts before but never bothered looking up. Just browsing the word list confronts you with quite a few of them, and tells you what the are. Honestly, did you know what opprobrium, organon, oriflamme or ossuary really means, or did you just skip to the next sentence when you saw any of them in a book?
posted by Triplanetary at 2:49 PM on October 21, 2002

When I encountered 'phrontifugic' in Tom Robbins' _Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates_, WWftD came through for me where even the OED failed.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 3:16 PM on October 21, 2002

Perfectly cromulent.
posted by blue_beetle at 4:03 PM on October 21, 2002

Oh this is deliciously life-changing, geoff. Thank you!
posted by RJ Reynolds at 4:17 PM on October 21, 2002

Then there's always luciferous logolepsy a wonderful resource on obscure words brought to you by one of of our fellow Mefi-stopheleans.
posted by madamjujujive at 4:30 PM on October 21, 2002

That is brill! And here I thought I was doing well by visiting:
www.cobuild.collins.co.uk

Don't forget to go to the "Test your English" and win a dictionary! section.....
"Here are 30 concordance lines taken from the Bank of English, with the key word in the middle of the line removed. All 30 lines have the same word in the middle. Can you guess from the contexts what the missing word is?"
posted by alicesshoe at 11:59 PM on October 21, 2002

There certainly is much here to metagrobolize one!
posted by taz at 1:10 AM on October 22, 2002

Thanks alicesshoe! For others who want to try (this month's is so easy I suspect there's little chance of having your entry drawn from the hat), here's the direct link.
posted by languagehat at 8:16 AM on October 22, 2002

I never thought the day would come that I would see the word gyascutus outside a game of Balderdash.
posted by euphorb at 1:28 PM on October 22, 2002

Thanks languagehat, for the convenient link. I was still too new yesterday to provide a direct link. Now I can. Woohooo
posted by alicesshoe at 8:54 PM on October 22, 2002