What Is The Rarest English Verb?

[Malacandra]

@yabob

Whatever it is, it’s likely you never heard of it. There’s an awful lot of extremely obscure words you can find in a large dictionary, that probably don’t count as archaic, but are so incredibly seldom used that practically nobody is familiar with the word. Often they are words used only in some very specialized field, like a specific word for weaning a yak calf from its mother, or something like this. In fact, there’s a parlor game based on words like these, which is currently being done on the NPR show “Says You” as their so called “bluffing round”. In their version of it, the moderator announces a horribly obscure word, and pieces of paper are handed to the three members of one team. One of them has the actual definition, the other two are to make up definitions within 30 seconds. They all read out their definitions, which are usually ALL extremely silly sounding, and the other team has to guess which one is the real definition.

This was the basis of the BBC TV panel game Call My Bluff, except that all the definitions were given to the contestants on the reading team. It’s also the basis of “Balderdash”, in which all players submit written definitions to whoever’s quizmaster for that round (you take it in turns) and he reads out both the real definition and the made-up ones. Everyone then votes for whichever definition they think is right (you can’t vote for your own) and you score points either for spotting the correct definition or having your definition mistaken for the correct one by the other players.

[ralph124c]

Does anybody use " ycleped" (named) these days?

[EmilyG]

“Dandle” isn’t used much these days. It means to dance a baby on one’s knee.

[Ludovic]

@ralph124c

Does anybody use " ycleped" (named) these days?

Possibly people who are paraphrasing old documents, but I can’t be sure. I know that I have seen the alternate spelling “divers” when people were talking about old diverse situations, and outside of a quote box so it’s not like they are quoting someone verbatim.

[hibernicus]

@Schnitte

Funny; I wouldn’t have considered “derogate” such an obscure word. It’s used relatively frequently in legal writing - a provision derogates from another. Maybe a term of art that is not used a lot in everyday writing, but I still would have thought that the legal usage alone would suffice to prevent it from being a fringe word.

I would not consider “derogate” particularly obscure either. As you suspect, it’s not used a lot in everyday writing; 13 out of the 17 examples in the corpus are from the category “academic political law” and 6 of these 13 refer to European legislation.

The noun form “derogation” does a little better with 37 examples.

[Chronos]

Quoth Ludovic:

Possibly people who are paraphrasing old documents, but I can’t be sure. I know that I have seen the alternate spelling “divers” when people were talking about old diverse situations, and outside of a quote box so it’s not like they are quoting someone verbatim.

And presumably also outside of my signature. Still, though, that could just be a typo that’s not caught by autocorrect since it’s a (different) valid word.

And Skald the Rhymer has been known to use “yclept” on this board, but then, that’s Skald.

[James_Toothpaste]

@runner pat

This list claims to be the least common English words.
(alphabetical order)

That list is not right. I know a lot of those words.

[njtt]

@ralph124c

Does anybody use " ycleped" (named) these days?

More commonly found in the form “yclept”, I think, but definitely archaic either way.

[TimeWinder]

The correct answer is “glebct,” which means “to accidentally poke oneself painfully in the nostril while trying to adjust one’s glasses.” It’s not archaic, since I just made it up, and it’s only been used once, ever…since I just made it up.

[Kent_Clark]

Gyre. It’s a real word with a real meaning, but I’ve never heard it used as a verb outside of Jabberwocky.

[tapu]

@runner pat

This list claims to be the least common English words.
(alphabetical order)

right off the bat, *abate *would not seem to be so rare. does anyone else think so??

[tapu]

@hibernicus

That list consists largely of quite common words such as “compassion”, “asylum” and “abstain”.

You can check the British National Corpus to give one measure of the relative frequency of various words. For example “twiddle” appears 23 times, so if you find verbs that score lower than that, you may consider them as candidates. Examples: “chide” (13), “derogate” (17). You can also refine the search to exclude academic text, include only spoken word, etc.

NICE! thanks

[LouisB]

@twhitt

That’s nonsense. I know every one of those words, and some of them are used with great frequency, such as “renovation,” “hypothesis,” and “lobbyist.”

Absolutely----not a word on that list I didn’t know.

[Namkcalb]

[ul]
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@LouisB

Absolutely----not a word on that list I didn’t know.

I’ve never heard perfidious and had no idea what it meant

I wasn’t sure about the meaning of prosaic either.

But it’s true, some of those words are ridiculously common, who doesn’t use “Mundane”, “reclusive” or “lobbyist”

[robert_columbia]

@tapu

right off the bat, *abate *would not seem to be so rare. does anyone else think so??

I don’t think it’s rare. Outside of legal circles I would expect it to be uncommon, though. In law I believe it means “to become void or unenforceable due to some subsequent event or passage of time”, e.g. “The deportation order issued against Mary abated after she married a citizen and received a spousal visa.” I would expect that a few people would use the term “abate” in a metaphorical extension of its legal meaning like so many other words have their meanings extended. Maybe someone could say that, “The research done by Johnson (1995) into Important Science Stuff abated after Brown and Smith (2013) published their landmark paper defining a cohesive unified theory of Important Stuff.”. That is, Johnson’s work was rendered irrelevant, wrong, or tangential due to the new research. It’s not quite the same thing as legal nullity but it’s metaphorically related.

[smithsb]

Humor attempt - not political jab.

We should search the collected speeches of George Bush the younger for obscure verbs.

“misunderestimate”??

[mascaroni]

@Namkcalb

[ul]
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I’ve never heard perfidious and had no idea what it meant

I wasn’t sure about the meaning of prosaic either.

But it’s true, some of those words are ridiculously common, who doesn’t use “Mundane”, “reclusive” or “lobbyist”

“Perfidious” is a word I’ve only heard in one context: “Perfidious Albion” (Treacherous Britain), which is what the French used to call us before the Entente Cordiale. (Perfide Albion)

Rather like “Halcyon”, which I’ve only ever heard in the term “Halcyon days”.

Both adjectives though…

[Mahaloth]

@ralph124c

By “rarest”, I mean the least used. Excluding archaic verbs, what verb has the least use?
My guess would be “twiddle”…it doesn’t seem to get much use these days.

Do you mean rarest verb that is still widely known by most people?

[dtilque]

@njtt

More commonly found in the form “yclept”, I think, but definitely archaic either way.

It’s occasionally used by fantasy authors to give their writing an archaic feel. I first experienced the word in a story by a guy yclept Poul Anderson.

[Chronos]

robert_columbia, I was completely ignorant of the legal usage of the word “abate”, and so would never have used it any other context as an extrapolation from the legal usage. I do use it in its perfectly mundane lay meaning, though. For instance, one might say that a storm is abating, or an attack.