Comments on: Worthless Word for the Day.

Worthless Word for the Day.

geoff. — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 13:13:28 -0800

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.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 13:28:39 -0800

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.)

By: kickingtheground

kickingtheground — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 13:55:00 -0800

WWFTD? What Would the Financial Times Do?

By: grrarrgh00

grrarrgh00 — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 13:57:48 -0800

Whoo-hoo! I love this site!

By: Triplanetary

Triplanetary — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 14:49:54 -0800

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?

By: Zed_Lopez

Zed_Lopez — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 15:16:37 -0800

When I encountered 'phrontifugic' in Tom Robbins' _Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates_, WWftD came through for me where even the OED failed.

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 16:03:42 -0800

Perfectly cromulent.

By: RJ Reynolds

RJ Reynolds — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 16:17:38 -0800

Oh this is deliciously life-changing, geoff. Thank you!

By: madamjujujive

madamjujujive — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 16:30:32 -0800

Then there's always luciferous logolepsy a wonderful resource on obscure words brought to you by one of of our fellow Mefi-stopheleans.

By: alicesshoe

alicesshoe — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 23:59:45 -0800

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?"

By: taz

taz — Tue, 22 Oct 2002 01:10:21 -0800

There certainly is much here to metagrobolize one!

By: languagehat

languagehat — Tue, 22 Oct 2002 08:16:51 -0800

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.

By: euphorb

euphorb — Tue, 22 Oct 2002 13:28:46 -0800

I never thought the day would come that I would see the word gyascutus outside a game of Balderdash.

By: alicesshoe

alicesshoe — Tue, 22 Oct 2002 20:54:54 -0800

Thanks languagehat, for the convenient link. I was still too new yesterday to provide a direct link. Now I can. Woohooo