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New York Times 50 Most Challenging Words
- tmountain 16y agoFun list of words, but a few seem out of place. Namely: austerity, hubris, overhaul, ubiquitous, and hegemony, all of which seem fairly common. That being said, there are tons of words on this list that I'm unfamiliar with, and I look forward to digging into it more when I have time.
- bmm6o 16y agoAgreed. Some other entries on the list speak more to the current topics than readers' vocabulary, like Renminbi and Manichean.
- warfangle 16y agoI think the reason they listed Overhaul is they were going with the second definition: "to come from behind and pass them" I have never seen the word used this way...
- drats 16y agoI haven't seen it used like that either. I can't imagine an instance where it would be better than "overtake".
- jheitzeb 16y agoOne interesting aspect is that the NYT pulled these from their log of user's clicking the terms to look them up...so they correspond to their readership's (lack of) vocab
- kenjackson 16y agoThe list is for total number of lookups. Some words, like overhaul are looked up infrequently per use, but used a fair bit. See their table at: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/topics/topic/2010afterdeadlineblog.pdf http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/topics/topic/2010a... to see the breakdown of words that were looked up a lot per use vs words that were simply more commonly used.
- jamesbritt 16y agoOTOH, I recently heard a speaker talk about improving your writing, and she used "bewildered" as an example of an arcane or willfully highfalutin word. This left me, well, you know ...
- julius_geezer 16y agoSome years ago overseas I spoke to a couple, residents of Switzerland, who were looking through a novel of John Irving's; their English was very fluent, both having lived in English-speaking countries, but they had not run across the word "smitten"--though when I explained it and the use, they saw the etymology at once. We ran through a list of other words he had underlined, and I was surprised at how "literary" John Irving is; I had never thought of him as a writer who reaches for odd words, but every 10 pages there was a word you'd never hear in conversation.
- camiller 16y agoI agree with tmountain, I recognized a lot of the words from Freshman vocabulary in high school ... 19 years ago.
- Qz 16y ago2. Profligacy: recklessly wasteful; wildly extravagant, profligate behavior; Anderson’s profligacy cost him his job and its better you tighten up your belt before you go the same way. 5. Profligate: using money, resources, etc., in a way that wastes them; The firm’s profligate spending only hastened its downfall. List fail.
- danh 16y agoI thought that was an attempt at being funny, in a "See: recursion" kind of way.
- jackfoxy 16y agoIncluding a neologism coined by one of their columnists as #6 is beneath the dignity of the rest of the list. It hasn't made it to Google "define". The top hits when Googleing it all refer to Maureen Dowd "inventing" it, so you can't really say it has caught on. I imagine from the context it was used it should not have really stumped that many readers, who would have been familiar with "schadenfreude", and so have gotten the joke.
- tedunangst 16y agoAs the Times said, "As you no doubt realized, the entry with the highest rate of look-ups per use isn't really a word at all. Baldenfreude is a nonce word -- a one-time coinage, in this case Maureen Dowd’s fanciful twist on schadenfreude.", so your ire seems a little misdirected.
- jackfoxy 16y agoBusted.
- grellas 16y agoAbout a month ago, there was a post on HN of "unusual and amusing English words" (http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/unuwords.htm http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/unuwords.htm), which drew the astute comment from pg that the "best sort of obscure words are ones that are obscure because they're old or highly specialized, not because someone made them up and they never really became part of the spoken language" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1355056 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1355056). Though educated people will tend to know a good number of the words on the list posted here, I like this list because it generally sets forth old English standbys that tend to mark the vocabulary of the speaker as being above the average or the mundane while not being pretentious or artificially fanciful. There are many similar words: gossamer, latitudinarian, exegete, perforce, resplendent, and on and on. The key to such words, and to their strength, lies in the fact that they are not used day-by-day by most people, that they often have classical hooks, and that their use in modern forms of expression adds variety and interest precisely because they come at the reader from an unusual angle (basically, pg's point as made above). One can differ about this or that word, of course, but the broader point is that lists of this type are helpful and fun to review.
- jokermatt999 16y ago> or highly specialized This is what makes me love a word. When I can find a word that just perfectly and succinctly expresses what I'm trying to communicate, I love it. I don't use large or obscure words to show off; I use them because I enjoy having exactly the right word to say what I mean.
- presidentender 16y agoThus your working vocabulary lacks orthogonality, but compensates with brevity.
- daeken 16y agoI know you were making a joke (I think? I laughed, at least), but I wouldn't say that he's compensating with brevity; rather, he has depth and not (much) breadth.
- sliverstorm 16y agoI never knew the modern definition of sanguine. How funny, it kind of did an about-face! Reminds me of 'cleave apart' and 'cleave together'
- telemachos 16y agoWhat non-modern definition are you thinking of? Online dictionaries suggest that the meaning of "cheerful" or "optimistic" goes straight back to the theory of humors. E.g., from Dictionary.com: 3. (in old physiology) having blood as the predominating humor and consequently being ruddy-faced, cheerful, etc. Merriam-Webster.com has something similar. Dead tree dictionaries in my house, ditto. (Are you maybe thinking of the quasi-sound-alike 'sang-froid' => "calmness, composure; coolness of mind"?)
- sliverstorm 16y ago2 a : consisting of or relating to blood b : bloodthirsty, sanguinary It's true cheerful isn't exactly a direct opposite, but 2b sure isn't positive.
- telemachos 16y agoI was completely unaware of 2b. Thanks. (It sounds vaguely Shakespearean in that sense.)
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoI am not a native speaker, but I thought some definitions were questionable. - internecine has a strong connotation of "amongst themselves", which is borne out by the example but not in the definition; - the definition of Kristallnacht is useless if you don't know what it's referring to, and you will likely know the term if you do know what it is referring to. A link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht or "the prelude to the holocaust" would be better; - similarly, I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism#Theology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism#Theology (which highlights the split in a powerful-but-not-omnipotent good force and an also powerful evil force) should be linked. I stopped trying to verify things at this point; no doubt a native speaker can improve on this list.
- davidw 16y agoI am a native speaker, and wanted to write the same thing about 'internecine'. Indeed, wordnet says: adj 1: (of conflict) within a group or organization "an internecine feud among proxy holders" Manichean, as I understand it, refers more to a very strong binary view of things as either good or bad. For instance, from The Economist: "President George Bush's Manichean worldview—“you are either with us or against us”—is now echoed in Bangkok ..." They did the same thing with 'sclerotic', too by describing it in terms of the body, but not underlining how often it's used for things like organizations.
- doty 16y agoIt's interesting; for internecine that's what I had always used as the definition as well. However, the OED only lists two definitions: 1. orig. Deadly, destructive, characterized by great slaughter. internecine war, war for the sake of slaughter, war of extermination, war to the death. 2. esp. (In modern use.) Mutually destructive, aiming at the slaughter or destruction of each other. And a non-obvious etymology: [ad. L. internecn-us murderous, destructive, f. internecium slaughter, destruction, f. internecre: see next. App. first used as a rendering of L. internecnum bellum, in Butler's Hudibras (to which also is due the unetymological pronunciation, instead of interncine). On this authority entered by Johnson in his Dictionary, with an incorrect explanation, due to association with words like interchange, intercommunion, etc. in which inter- has the force of ‘mutual’, ‘each other’. From J. the word has come into later dictionaries and 19th c. use, generally in the Johnsonian sense.] (And 'baldenfreud' is a bit out of place on a list like this; a neologism if I've ever heard one.)
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- commieneko 16y agoA better title for this would be "50 somewhat uncommon, but not particularly challenging words some of our readers had to look up using our online word definition utility."
- JacobAldridge 16y agoSure, but then it wouldn't have fit into the character limit of the title field on the HN submit page, which I'm sure was a key factor for the NY Times / Currently Obsessed.
- techiferous 16y agoNote that egregious has negative connotations.
- CountHackulus 16y agoAs a native French speaker, I'm quite amused that several of these words are either French or have a basis in French. Seems that English has appropriated many words from other languages.
- gabrielroth 16y agoSome of them ('Crèches,' for example) are from French, but perhaps you're thinking of others (e.g. 'nascent') that come to both English and French from Latin.
- jamesbritt 16y ago"Seems that English has appropriated many words from other languages." Metric ass-loads. It's the best feature of the language: Shameless theft when a good word comes along.
- zbyszek 16y agoIt has. French was the language of the aristocracy in England for several centuries after the 1066 Norman conquest, giving rise to a sort of linguistic duality of French and Anglo-Saxon words in English mirroring the social divide. Thus Saxon-derived words tend to be more down-to-earth than their more elevated French-derived equivalents.
- waterlesscloud 16y agoWhat's amusing is not only knowing the words, but being able to make a good guess about their most frequent contexts. I bet "Comity" is almost always used in a story about the U.S. Senate, for example.