Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmountain | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com