Today, after a full year of Friday Vocabulary posts, I am pleased to announce the launch of my Lexicon page, comprising every word I have used in my weekly Vocabulary, along with its definition. (Or at least one definition; several words utilize a meaning other than the most common. Caveat lector!) In addition to showing every word used, the Lexicon page is searchable, with a search box below the displayed words (by default 50 words are shown, so you may have to scroll down a trifle). Just select “Word Entry” from the dropdown (an ungainly denotation, which I may change if anyone actually cares), enter your search term, and Voilà!
The search function matches on parts, so, for example, you can quickly find all the ‘super’ words I’ve shared.
Or you can look at the ‘ology’ words, if you’re so inclined.
My personal favorite is this search on the string ‘ence’, which returns some of my most favorite words, including one from the very first Friday Vocabulary post, over eight years ago.
You can also search by definition, among other things. Go ahead, give it a try!
Now I have not been promulging Vocabulary lists every week for the last eight years. In fact, I have only been consistently doing so for the past fifty-two weeks after stopping some four months into the original experiment in 2011 (save for one exceptional post in 2016). Still, a number of words have passed under the WordPress, and now all those words are assembled for your perusal and study. In fact, over seven hundred words have been defined so far — 702, to be precise. The Lexicon listing, however, currently shows 707 entries, as I have broken out some definitions (such as for ‘supercillium’ in the first image above) when a word’s meaning was sufficiently distinct, or when a given definition spanned two parts of speech.
For the most part, these words are those I stumble over in my reading. I usually use an app to quickly look them up — though the app not infrequently lacks either the word or the meaning I look for — and then eventually add them to my Vocabulary for some week in the future. Some words remain in my prospects list for a long, long time, either because I have difficulty defining them or because I am flummoxed as to what sentence I might construct for them to inhabit. At times I find a prospect when looking up another word (I use a physical dictionary—at least one!—as well as the app when preparing my vocabulary). And occasionally one of my (three!) readers will suggest a word, for which I am ever so grateful.
When preparing the weekly listing, I look at the candidate word in my dictionary app as well as a physical, not to say bulky, dictionary. I most frequently use The Oxford Universal Dictionary, a one-volume tome that has been a wonderful resource, as it often contains older terms its digital sibling lacks. The particular edition which sits by my desk is the third, published with addenda in 1955. Of course, some terms require more effort, such as ‘flavescent’, which I believe showed up in a novel by one of the lesser Brontës, if memory serves me well. Always there is the Internet as well, in truly desperate cases. I then create a definition trying to be true to the sense of the word as I encountered it, while not slavishly copying the dictionaries consulted (which would be plagiarism).
Creating a sentence can sometimes be difficult, especially if the word is one I have only rarely seen in my reading. Looking at the word as used over time in different sentences gives me the feel for the word before I trap it in my example sentence. For older words, I consult the former BYU corpora, now English-Corpora dot org, using primarily the Early English Books Online (EEBO), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Like all ‘free’ resources, some of these have begun to throttle my access, though I usually don’t hit the limits in my once-a-week searching.
Keen-eyed observers (if any remain to read this far) will have noted the anomalous ‘2’ at the tail of my 702 Lexicon entries. These represent a couple of bonus words, slang terms which I appended to my usual listing. I may start doing this more regularly, as there are so many non-standard terms which I feel should be preserved, though I may need some divine help if I am to craft sentences for terms like ‘on fleek’ (not a candidate).
I will continue to update the Lexicon with new words from the weekly posts, and may play around with other features and fun. It seems I may have to learn PHP to do some things I’m thinking of, however, and that seems … boring. Especially when I have new Dray Prescot books to read. Let me know if you have features you’d like to see, though, and I will endeavor to make your wishes a reality. And please do let me know of any favorite words you’d like to see on Friday; that I can do much more readily I am sure.