@Adragayle I am very appreciative of these words.
Always nice to know you are not alone in feeling this way.
@CharlesGrove It is so good to hear you are enjoying this thread. It is indeed very nice to know that others also appreciate and are interested in words.
Askew (adjective | uh-SKYOO) Askew means “not straight” or “at an angle,” and can be used as both an adjective and an adverb.
// The picture on the cabin wall was slightly askew.
// The picture was hung askew on the cabin wall.
Did You Know?
If you watch enough nature documentaries you may notice that gazelles are able to escape the claws (and, subsequently, jaws) of cheetahs when they zigzag across the savannah rather than simply run in a straight line. In Middle English, prey outmaneuvering a predator in this way might be said to be “skewing.” Skew means both “to take an oblique course” (as it does in modern English too) as well as “to escape,” and comes from the Anglo-French word eschiver, meaning “to escape or avoid.” It’s this skew, with its suggestion of crooked lines, that forms the basis of the adjective askew (the prefix a- means “in [such] a state or condition”). Askew is used as both an adjective and an adverb to describe things or actions that are a little off, not straight, or at an angle. The “escape” sense of the Middle English skew isn’t so much implied by askew, but we suppose that a painting hanging askew on one’s wall could be, metaphorically speaking, attempting to escape from the rest of the décor.
Career (verb | kuh-REER) To career is to go at top speed especially in a headlong manner.
// The tourists gripped their seats and exchanged anxious looks as the bus careered along the narrow roads.
If you’re already familiar with career’s equestrian history, surely you joust. The noun career dates to the early 16th century, when it referred to the speed of something moving along a particular course. To go “in full career” or “at full career” was to hurtle, barrel, blaze, or zip, a meaning employed by Sir Walter Scott in a jousting scene in his historical romance Ivanhoe: “The trumpets sounded, and the knights charged each other in full career.” The verb career thus originally conveyed the action of a horse or rider making a short gallop or charge, as when the very aptly named John Speed wrote in his 1611 Historie of Great Britain “his horse of a fierce courage carrierd [=careered] as he went.” It later gained additional senses applied to the movement of horses, such as “to prance or caracole” (“to turn to one side and another in running”), as well as one—“to rush forward quickly and recklessly”—that can be applied to anything or anyone feeling their oats, velocity-wise.
I love the relationship/not actually related interplay between “Career” and “Careen”.
False cognates are fun.
Emollient (noun | ih-MAHL-yunt) An emollient is something, such as a lotion, that softens or soothes.
// She keeps a number of oils in the bathroom—argan, almond, and coconut—to use as emollients.
The noun emollient is used most often in reference to a substance—such as an oil, cream, lotion, butter, or balm—used to treat someone's skin or hair. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it traces back to a Latin word, the verb emollire, meaning "to soften or soothe." Emollire, in turn, formed in part from the adjective mollis, meaning "soft." (Another descendant of mollis is mollify, which means "to make softer in temper or disposition.") Emollient first appeared in print in English in the early 1600s as an adjective with the meaning "making soft or supple," describing things such as herbs, medicines, and poultices; the noun arrived on the scene soon after.
Gregarious (adjective | grih-GAIR-ee-us)
Gregarious is used to describe someone who enjoys the company of other people.
// Justin’s gregarious personality made it easy for him to get to know people at the networking event
Everyone knows that birds of a feather flock together, so it comes as no surprise that gregarious was applied mainly to animals when it first began appearing in English texts in the 17th century. After all, gregarious comes from the Latin noun grex, meaning “flock” or “herd,” and it’s tough to avoid being social when you’re part of a flock, flying and roosting cheek by jowl (or beak) with your fellow feathered friends. Take starlings, for example, which congregate in massive numbers—we define the word starling as “any of a family of usually dark gregarious birds,” meaning that starlings are inclined to associate with others of their kind. By the 18th century gregarious was being used to describe social human beings as well, be they chatty Cathys or convivial Connors who relish being in the company of others.
Brobdinagian (adjective) - Gigantic. From the giant Brobdinags of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
@WriterGF From Merriam-Webster:
Brobdingnagian Comes From Gulliver's Travels
In Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, Brobdingnag is the name of a land that is populated by a race of human giants "as tall as an ordinary spire steeple." In Gulliver's first close-up encounter with the giants, he is attempting to get past a stile of which every step is six feet high when a group of field-workers approach with strides ten yards long and reaping hooks as large as six scythes. Their voices he at first mistakes for thunder. Swift's book fired the imagination of the public and within two years of the 1726 publication of the story, people had begun using Brobdingnagian to refer to anything of unusually large size. (Swift himself had used Brobdingnagian as a noun to refer to the inhabitants of Brobdingnag.
“Brobdingnagian.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Brobdingnagian. Accessed 8 Mar. 2025.
@WriterGF I didn't know this. My only experience with Gulliver's Travels was the infamous story of Lilliput. Thanks for sharing!
I used to use that term all the time.
Alright now say that word 5x fast...
@GuyverGordon 😂😂😂 You first.... ˌbräb-diŋ-ˈna-gē-ən
@Adragayle 😅
@GuyverGordon if you click the link of the citation in my post above, there is a speaker icon that will say it for you to hear how it is pronounced. It looks harder than it actually is
Two thoughts: 1) It kind of sounds like an alien race 2) I can hear it pretty well ... I dont think I can say it all that well. It is one of those that as you say you go, "oh yeah, I got it" and then then next time I say it to someone else, I sound like I am drunk 😄
😂😂😂
Wend (verb | WEND)
Wend is a literary word that means “to move slowly from one place to another usually by a winding or indirect course”; wending is traveling or proceeding on one’s way in such a manner.
// Hikers wend along the marked trails to the top of the mountain, which provides a panoramic view of the area towns.
// We wended our way through the narrow streets of the city’s historic quarter
“Out through the fields and woods / And over the walls I have wended …” So wrote poet Robert Frost in “Reluctance,” using the word’s familiar sense of “to direct one’s course.” By the time of the poem’s publication in 1913, many other senses of wend had wended their way into and out of popular English usage including “to change direction,” “to change someone’s mind,” “to transform into something else,” and “to turn (a ship’s head) in tacking.” All of that turning is linked to the word’s Old English ancestor, wendan, which shares roots with the Old English verb, windan, meaning “to twist” (windan is also the ancestor of the English verb wind as in “the river winds through the valley”). Wend is also to thank for lending the English verb go its past tense form went (as a past tense form of wend, went has long since been superseded by wended).
Imperturbable (adjective | im-per-TER-buh-bul)
Imperturbable describes someone or something marked by extreme calm; such a person or thing is very hard to disturb or upset.
// The imperturbable captain did not panic when the boat sailed into the path of a violent storm.
// Nothing disrupted the contestant's imperturbable focus.
Imperturbable is a bit of a mouthful, but don’t let its five syllables perturb you. Instead, let us break it down: this word, as well as its antonym perturbable, comes from the Latin verb perturbare, meaning "to agitate, trouble, or throw into confusion." Perturbare comes in turn from the combination of per-, meaning "thoroughly," and turbare, meaning "to disturb"; unsurprisingly perturbare is also the source of the English verb perturb. Other perturbare descendants include disturb ("to destroy the tranquility or composure of") and turbid ("thick or opaque with or as if with roiled sediment").
Quark ( noun | KWORK) Quark is a word used in physics to refer to any one of several types of very small particles that make up matter.
// Quarks, which combine together to form protons and neutrons, come in six types, or flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.
If you were a physics major, chances are that James Joyce didn’t make it onto your syllabus. While literature majors are likely more familiar with his work, Joyce has a surprising tie to physics. In the early 1960s, American physicist Murray Gell-Man came up with the word quork, which he used to refer to his concept of an elementary particle smaller than a proton or neutron (by his own account he was in the habit of using names like “squeak” and “squork” for peculiar objects). He later settled on the spelling quark after reading a line from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark! / Sure he has not got much of a bark / And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.” The name stuck and has been used by physicists ever since.
Multifarious (adjective | mul-tuh-FAIR-ee-us)
Something described as multifarious has great diversity or variety, or is made up of many and various kinds of things. Multifarious is a formal word and a synonym of diverse.
// He participated in multifarious activities throughout college.
Before the late 16th-century appearance of multifarious, English speakers used another word similar in form and meaning: multifary, meaning "in many ways," appeared—and disappeared—in the 15th century. Before either of the English words existed, there was the Medieval Latin word multifarius, from the Latin adverb multifariam, meaning "in many places." Multi-, as you may know, means "many," and is used to form, well, multifarious English words, from multicultural to multimillion. The word omnifarious ("of all varieties, forms, or kinds"), a relative of multifarious, is created with omni- ("all") rather than multi-.