Language Archives

I haven’t come across any particularly interesting new words lately, so I’m just going to share one of Merriam-Webster’s words of the day, corvine. It’s an adjective that means “resembling a crow”.

The adjective glabrous sounds like what it means: “smooth”, “bald”, or more specifically, “having a surface without hairs or projections”.

The adjective moonstruck means “mentally deranged, supposedly by the influence of the moon” or “dreamily romantic”. Since people who are in love are also described as crazy, it’s not so surprising that this word refers to both at the same time. Love, insanity, the moon — this word has a dramatic story built right into its definition!

If you know your Latin roots, you’ll know exactly what this one means. To obnubilate is “to obscure” or “cloud over”.

The 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee is this week, and the website lists two of the spellers’ favorite words: humuhumunukunukuapuaa (”a small Hawaiian triggerfish”) and Weissnichtwo, which is “an indefinite, unknown, or imaginary place”.

The noun miasma has a couple definitions. The most common is “a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike influence or atmosphere”.

The adjective otiose means “useless”, “ineffective”, or “being at leisure”. It comes straight from that Latin word otiosus, “having leisure or ease, not busy”.

No, blandish doesn’t only mean “sort of bland”. It’s also a verb that means “to coax or influence by gentle flattery”.

I’ve been reading a lot of scholarly journals lately for a school research paper, and I keep running across the word posit, as in “the first hypothesis posits that…” The verb to posit simply means “to place” or “to put”. More specifically, it also means “to lay down or assume as a fact or principle” or “to put forward, as for consideration or study”.

This word made me laugh because it sounds like it means “something that is extremely jacent.” Unfortunately, superjacent isn’t nearly that interesting; it just means “lying above”, like adjacent means “lying next to”.