The Year in Words I Didn’t Know

My Kindle has a funky little new feature that I’ve grown increasingly fond of over the past year. Traditionally, every time one holds their finger down on a word, it comes up with the definition. It’s an incredibly useful feature, and one that I now find myself sorely missing in physical books. (Looking up words in a separate dictionary? What am I, an animal?!) However, with a Kindle update last spring, this feature now also tracks all the words you looked up and puts them in a big list called ‘Vocabulary Builder’. It’s more like a ‘Vocabulary Walk of Shame’, but it amuses me to no end.

So here are the words that I had no clue what they meant this year. I blame the majority of these on Rick Atkinson, who might have the most absurdly large vocabulary of any contemporary historian I’ve ever read.

Sobriquet
Licentious
Charnel
Assignation
Apostolic
Piker
Fricative
Fettle
Propitiated
Obduracy
Sanguinary
Coterie
Gurkhas
Febrile
Mulish
Sangfroid
Impecunious
Picayune
Patois
Truculent
Troglodyte
Traduced
Epistolary
Lathing
Crepuscular
Narthex
Uxorious
Quixotically
Spoor
Cabanas
Cadging
Abrogate
Desultory
Pusillanimous
Haberdashery
Perspicacious
Obdurate

So if you know of any of those, congratulations, you are smarter than I was in 2014! I feel slightly redeemed in that even my spell checker doesn’t know some of those words.

Hooray for English!