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English sure does have a lot of one-syllable words. What are some good ones, that have really uncommon meanings?

My favorite is "trach"-- to stab a hollow tube through someone's trachea thus allowing them to breathe if their upper windpipe is blocked. More or less. (Wiktionary lists it only as a noun, but Wiktionary is wrong.)

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con quesa- firm believer in the right of Spanish cheese to be female if she so chooses

"There's nothing inherently different between knowing who Venusaur is and knowing who Lady Macbeth is" -Xephyr

There is also, of course, the bleb.

Edit: oh, and screed. But we all know what a screed is, right? right?

Doesn't quite fit the topic, but I've always found it a bit strange that "cormorant" in Japanese is u. It's just so short!

This is the only good reason to open a copy of the Daily Mail. They have (or had?) 'the world's smallest, hardest crossword', made up of words of up to four letters. It's pretty much impossible without the aid of a very extensive dictionary.

EDIT: google, for instance, gives me some clues from the crossword that people were looking for help with: 'serpent-lizard' (seps), and '12c and 13c court circuit' (eyre).

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

This made me think of screeve, which is rarely used outside the context of Georgian grammar.

If by rarely used you mean non-existent.

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Yes.

Wiktionary says it's also a verb meaning 'to write' but I've never seen or heard it used in that way.

It may be Scots. It sounds highly similar to scrìobh.

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*bangs head on table*

Or, you know, to Latin 'scribere'? Intervocalic voiced stops lenite to fricatives in many romance languages. And indeed whatever the ancestor of German 'schreiben' is - sure you can find something germanic that sounds very similar.

Anyway, I agree that 'screeve' meaning 'to write' isn't really used, but you do occasionally see the participle, 'scriven'. '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.

EDIT: Regarding the georgian meaning: you sometimes see it used in conlanging, for merged or fused TAM(etc)-paradigms (I've used it this way myself), but I don't know whether it's ever found for that purpose in linguistics. It certainly ought to be, it's a useful word!

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

I have heard scrivener used as a translation for a legal position that seems to be particular to Japan and South Korea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_scrivener

Erm, yes, ultimately. I merely suggested an intermediate step. There's no reason to bang your head on the table. As for why Scots, West Germanic doesn't lenite the b, and French, which is the primary romance contributor to English, lenites it so much that it disappears. Meanwhile, both North Germanic and Celtic languages like to have /v/ or /f/ in that position, two influences that like to be felt especially strongly in Scotland. Turns out, it's Italian, of course, but that's still not a reason to act all exasperated.

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It is, but only for Georgian and closely related languages.

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Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

MHG schrîben, OHG scrīban, from Latin scribere 'engrave with a stylus' according to dwds.de.

There's 'thede' in certain circles of political theory, but since I'm entirely responsible for that I suppose it doesn't really count.

Hitting Wiktionary:
aal - Indian mulberry
aam - a historical measure of wine from certain regions of the Netherlands and Germany

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Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

Awl - that thing that shoemakers or whoever used to punch holes in leather. (homophonous with "all" IMD)

Adze - a tool used to shape wood when carving (homophonous with "ads" and "adds" IMD)

EDIT: Fail. Most likely not one-syllable. The aaa, a kind of insect from Hawaii.

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spraint
frass (I don't mean to be Shm Jay, I just ran across spraint and then figured there must be some others like it)

Also: sine

Make that definitely not.

That reminds me of one-syllable words used in e.g. abstract algebra that are also commonly used words, but have a specific meaning when it comes to math. For example:

-ring ("an abelian group with a second binary operation that is associative and is distributive over the abelian group operation")
-group ("a set of elements together with an operation that combines any two of its elements to form a third element also in the set while satisfying four conditions called the group axioms, namely closure, associativity, identity and invertibility")

etc. These probably aren't really what we're looking for in this thread though.

I thought of those too, but yes, they aren't the right thing. Then I thought of rngs and rigs, but the names are so hokey and no one actually thinks about rngs and rigs anyway.

Oh, I just remembered: vog. A terrible blend of a blend (smoke + fog = smog, then "volcanic smog" = vog)... but unfortunately the word is actually used, for example in the published papers of volcanologists.

spile n. A small wooden peg used to control the flow of air into, and carbon dioxide out of, a cask of ale.
shive n. The hole in the side of a cask of ale into which a spile is inserted.

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swyve

chyme