havering - a Scots dialect word meaning ‘hesitating’. I could infer it from the context, but I just wanted to check.
Lemme see if I can emulate an old green monochrome monitor here …
OH NO! YOU HAVE WANDERED INTO THE
SLAVERING FANGS OF A LURKING GRUE!
]?
(sorry)
Erm, anyway …
I’m pretty good at figuring out unfamiliar words based on the context in which they’re used, so I don’t recall the last time I looked up a word I came across while reading. But nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot manages to come up with some really obscure words in his lyrics, and I’ve had to look up a few of them. The most recent was the word “acaudate”, which means “lacking a tail”.
Caliginous, in a Barbara Hambly book. But then, I can always count on her to throw in a particularly crunchy word.
Why are so many people posting words and not defining them…that’s just MEAN. <_<
Hell, I’m just happy I took my GRE’s the week before. Otherwise, I’d be scrambling like mad copying and pasting this shit into my huge-assed Wordpad file and numbering them to memorize later (but I’m not a geek :smack: :smack: :smack: )
Check this out The Well-Tempered Plot Device: Nick Lowe
"The rules are simple. Each player takes a different volume of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and at the word “go” all open their books at random and start leafing through, scanning the pages. The winner is the first player to find the word “clench”. It’s a fast, exciting game – sixty seconds is unusually drawn-out – and can be varied, if players get too good, with other favourite Donaldson words like wince, flinch, gag, rasp, exigency, mendacity, articulate, macerate, mien, limn, vertigo, cynosure… It’s a great way to get thrown out of bookshops. Good racing!
"
xanthic
An elementary student armed with a thesaurus picked this synonym for yellowish.
And oh yeah, the last word I had to look up was “louche” louche - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
“Even her slightly hooked nose had become less accipitrine than columbaceous.” - The Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson.
I knew ‘accipitrine’ meant ‘hawk-like’, but had to hunt around for ‘columbaceous’. It turns out to mean ‘pigeon-like’.
“pusillanimous” - I had heard the word before and from context had a definition in my head “like a pussy”, finally looked it up and found I was pretty much right.
Soteriology. I was reading a theological essay.
Otiose would be an excellent name for a boat.
Cromulent, which is my new favoritist word.
“Provenience” in a Preston-Child novel. I thought they’d misspelled “provenance.” Nope. Provenience is indeed a word, and it means pretty much the same as provenance (which I only know from watching those adorable Keno twins on Antiques Roadshow).
I kept a dictionary at hand when reading The Name of the Rose, but I don’t recall any of the words I looked up. Probably two or three on every page.
Not to quibble with wherever you got this definition, but from a quick poll of five or six people who all haver on a daily basis, i would say it meant ‘talking shite’ rather than hesitating. Although i suppose it could have come from there back in the day.
You know what’s fun? That comes from the same Latin root as “Negotiate”. Literally, negotiating is what you’re doing when you’re not relaxing.
That’s what The Proclaimers would have us believe, certainly. And I yield to no man in my appreciation of those two!
I had to look up restaurateur the other day, because I was a bit befuddled that it didn’t have an n in it.
I always found that strange as well, until I considered the French origins of the word “restaurant”. Literally it means “place of restoring”, i.e. you’re weak with hunger, and the food and drink restores you. The guy who runs the place is the “restorer”. (In fact, I just put “restaurateur” into my translation software, and it returned “restorer”.)
It illustrates the difference between the French approach and, say, the American approach. The French see the restaurateur’s job as being taking care of the customers, while we Americans see the restaurateur’s job as being running the restaurant. Effectively the same thing, but subtly different in priorities.
My personal favorite along those lines is “tavern” and “tabernacle” coming from the same Latin root: taberna.