New York Times 50 Most Challenging Words | Hacker News Reader

New York Times 50 Most Challenging Words

currentlyobsessed.com

71 pointsmmaunder38 comments

About a month ago, there was a post on HN of "unusual and amusing English words" (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).

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.

> 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.

Thus your working vocabulary lacks orthogonality, but compensates with brevity.

I 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.

That man can use few words but they are good words and so we can know what they all mean. If we have to use words that are not as good we have to say them more, but we do not need to know as many words.

My biggest problem growing up was that I could latch onto these highly specialized words at an early age and wholly grasp the meaning. I then knew simple and advanced words, yet if someone didn't know the word I used I would have a hell of a time explaining it because I didn't have the moderately difficult words to still explain it in a rather succinct way.

I love talking, however I like being precise with my wording. It creates an elegance without trying to create artificial elitism. Knowing words isn't a cause of intelligence it's a correlated result and faking the latter to mimic the former is a fools quest.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. -- Mark Twain

I 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 or "the prelude to the holocaust" would be better; - similarly, I think 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.

I 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.

It'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.)

The list as a whole was strong on denotations, but weak on connotations. It doesn't answer the general question of why you would use "jejune" rather than "naive". Then again, it is very hard to capture these subtle word connotations by using more words. These words aren't just a great way to capture a particular idea and look sophisticated, they're also a great way to expose yourself as a poser not just by misusing a word entirely, but by using the word where the denotation holds but the connotation is off.

Having looked at the Latin dictionaries, I blush to see how wrong I was about internecine. Check out Lewis & Short's Latin dictionary at perseus.tufts.edu, under internecine, internecio, interneco.

But indeed if I wanted to know about Kristallnacht, I don't think that I really would need the etymology of "Nacht".

Including 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.

As 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.

Busted.

Fun 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.

Agreed. Some other entries on the list speak more to the current topics than readers' vocabulary, like Renminbi and Manichean.

I 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...

I haven't seen it used like that either. I can't imagine an instance where it would be better than "overtake".

One 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

The 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/2010a... to see the breakdown of words that were looked up a lot per use vs words that were simply more commonly used.

OTOH, 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 ...

Some 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.

2. 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.

I thought that was an attempt at being funny, in a "See: recursion" kind of way.

I agree with tmountain, I recognized a lot of the words from Freshman vocabulary in high school ... 19 years ago.

As 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.

Some 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.

"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.

It 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.

I never knew the modern definition of sanguine. How funny, it kind of did an about-face!

Reminds me of 'cleave apart' and 'cleave together'

What 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"?)

2 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.

I was completely unaware of 2b. Thanks. (It sounds vaguely Shakespearean in that sense.)

What'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.

A 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."

Sure, 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.

Note that egregious has negative connotations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com