zompist bboard

I see your drupe and raise you a pome.

lakh and crore

We had a couple math terms here and it made me think of the word nome.

Xephyr wrote:lakh and crore

Are those really "technical" or "rare"? They're as common as "thousand" or "million" in Indian English.

And outside of Indian English...

Nessari wrote:And outside of Indian English...

Just trying to establish the parameters. Because if any common term specific to a variety with 100 million speakers or fewer is fair game, then there are a lot more BE terms we could be posting here.

The parameters of the game were never meant to be limited to rare words, but rather to oddly specific or technical meanings of monosyllabic words. I.e. sememes you wouldn't immediately suspect would get such concise lexemes to express them, the point being to illustrate how incredibly monosyllabic English can be.

Sorry for gravedigging, but thanks to autocorrect I just learned the word trank, specifically definition #2: "the piece of leather from which a glove is cut", and I immediately thought of this thread

Pons: A region of the brain stem in between the Medulla and the Midbrain.

Salmoneus wrote: 'Scrivener' is an old word for a scribe - a word you don't encounter in daily life, but that does crop up in mediaeval settings now and then. You also sometimes see 'screever', though it's now mostly used for artists rather than writers.

Let's not forget Bartleby the Scrivener!

TaylorS wrote:Pons: A region of the brain stem in between the Medulla and the Midbrain.

Why do those need capitalization xD?

"roid him up a little more"

My director commenting to another animator that a character with big muscley veiny arms could look even more exaggeratedly steroid-swollen. It was a one-off, an ad hoc verbing of an abbreviated noun but I thought of this thread because of how much meaning was in that one syllable.

It's not that rare, in some circles at least


(Not that I really want to contribute to the "Here's a rare word!" - "Pah, scoff! I use it every day!" pattern that can be found throughout this thread, but to be honest, I have heard it 'relatively often', for an ad-hoc derivation like that)

I learned this one today, after browsing an etymological dictionary: thill

thill : a shaft, especially one of a pair, used to attach a cart or carriage to the animal drawing it.

It's cognate with Latin 'témó', which has the same meaning.

Terra wrote:I learned this one today, after browsing an etymological dictionary: thill

thill : a shaft, especially one of a pair, used to attach a cart or carriage to the animal drawing it.

It's cognate with Latin 'témó', which has the same meaning.

I learned about that same word in the book I mentioned over in the PIE thread!

"Carbs", for "carbohydrates". Apparently a thing among nutrition-minded folks.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category: ... d_with_-th a bunch in here

Shed and pick, in the context of weaving.

Came across "quirt" in one novel and "rowel" in another. (The latter is listed as bisyllabic in most dictionaries, but I can't perceive a consistent differentiation between this and "role" IMD.)

For role and rowel I have [ɹɔɫ] and [ɹoʊ̯wɫ̩]. Not entirely sure about the vowels, but I definitely pronounce the w in the latter and have the l syllabic.

linguoboy wrote:Came across "quirt" in one novel and "rowel" in another. (The latter is listed as bisyllabic in most dictionaries, but I can't perceive a consistent differentiation between this and "role" IMD.)

I don't know how you pronounce "role", but my first instinct was to pronounce "rowel" /ˈɹaʊ(ə)l/, which turns out to be the pronunciation the dictionaries also ɡive.

din wrote:

linguoboy wrote:Came across "quirt" in one novel and "rowel" in another. (The latter is listed as bisyllabic in most dictionaries, but I can't perceive a consistent differentiation between this and "role" IMD.)

I don't know how you pronounce "role", but my first instinct was to pronounce "rowel" /ˈɹaʊ(ə)l/, which turns out to be the pronunciation the dictionaries also ɡive.

Ah, turns out I was misreading the phonetic spelling in the AHD which uses /ou/ to represent /au/.

Another candidate: add as a noun. Unless there's a meaning I'm not aware of, this has the very technical sense of "the act of adding someone to a group on social media" or "person so added".

In video games, usually MMORPGs, 'adds' are mobs spawned in the middle of a boss fight.

Matrix wrote:In video games, usually MMORPGs, 'adds' are mobs spawned in the middle of a boss fight.

"Mob" itself may fit the topic, in the sense of (to quote Wiktionary) "A non-player character [in a video game] that exists to be fought or killed to further the progression of the story or game."