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deque /dɛk/ - in computer science, a double-ended queue

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ZBB Conlang Index (check first post)

I recently ran into roan (a.) "with a mixture of black and white hairs, so as to appear gray-haired from a distance".

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[ˌʔaɪsəˈpʰɻ̊ʷoʊpɪɫ ˈʔæɫkəɦɔɫ]

Not a big fantasy fan, I take it!

To correct you, though: roan is a mix of dark and white hairs, and the colours don't necessarily blur. In horses, black-and-white roaning is called 'blue roan'. There are also bay roans and chestnut roans (either of which can be called 'red roan'). Technically in horses it's more complicated, because it refers to particular genetic conditions that produce roan, while other conditions that may in some cases look visually similar aren't considered technically roan. But I suspect most people don't make those distinctions.

"Roan" is an adjective, but it's also a noun, referring either to the colour, the condition causing the colour, or to a horse of that colour. It's also used with non-horses.

So this and this are both roan.

Other monosyllables with related meanings include "ticked" and "merle".

Other monosyllables regarding horses include "bay", "nag", "mare" and "cob" (which has a range of meaning iirc).

Apparently 'roan' is also a type of leather, and a type of valley.

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Blog: http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/

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!

Evidently not the horsey kind of fantasy at least.

(Though I've still been aware of the Finnish equivalent term for long. And that's a fun thought: I wonder how far one could get with this same topic in Finnish. Probably not very…)


Interesting that you include mare but not e.g. foal or trot — more common yet for sure, but mare strikes me as closer to this latter group than to your other three terms.

(Would people also think of ewe, ram, sow, buck etc. as "rare words"? There are probably a couple relatively obscure words of this type, but I tend to assume people have learned at least the "standard barnyard animal" ones already from childrens' books.)

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[ˌʔaɪsəˈpʰɻ̊ʷoʊpɪɫ ˈʔæɫkəɦɔɫ]

Adults, maybe. But the iPad generation has ditched the barnyard animals in favor of Pokemon.

If you're talking about Finnish päistärikkö, could the word be a loan from Slavic (cf. Polish pstrokaty “multicolored”, “spotted”; Russian пёстрый id. &c.)?

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The conlanger formerly known as “the conlanger formerly known as Pole, the”.

If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.

I've seen 'ort' used to refer to the little scraps of thread one gets in sewing and embroidery.

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I can haz blog

Purely by chance, I just stumbled across the obsolete English law term tolt "a writ by which a cause pending in a court baron was removed into a country court."

The standard Finnish term is kimo. Päistärikkö seems to be a derivative from päistär "leftover fibres from cleaning hamp" (which, however, is indeed derived from Slavic, if from a different lexeme, as in Russian паздер 'straw, etc.')

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[ˌʔaɪsəˈpʰɻ̊ʷoʊpɪɫ ˈʔæɫkəɦɔɫ]

Ah, we have this word in Polish (this meaning is, however, not universally known nowadays; the word became a generic pejorative descriptor in colloquial Polish).

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The conlanger formerly known as “the conlanger formerly known as Pole, the”.

If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.

orf n. An exanthemous disease caused by a parapox virus, occurring primarily in sheep and goats but also capable of infecting humans.

skeel - a shallow wooden vessel for holding milk or cream

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Blog: http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/

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!

rill- a small stream or brook.

Oh, I wouldn't have thought of that one as rare! Maybe I was exposed to too much poetry (/geography) at an impressionable age...

Two near-synonyms that are a bit more obscure are gill and ghyll, which various refer to either a stream or or the ravine that carries it. Iirc, most places in England it's "gill", mostly meaning the stream, but in the North it's "ghyll", and traditionally refers to the ravine that carries the beck, though it seems it's now used for the beck itself now (if you look up ghyll scrambling, there seems to be disagreement as to whether you're theoretically scrambling the ravine but going in the beck a lot, or scrambling the beck but sometimes leaving it).
However, although it's theoretically a normal borrowing with a northern spelling, it's also "ghyll" in the weald, where there weren't any norse. Maybe it's jutish or something, or a reflection of later migration into the area. Anyway, in the weal it's the primary traditional word for small streams, which do indeed tend to form ravines, though not of the Northern type*, but i've not heard it used for the ravine, only the stream.

*what I mean is that the ghylls up north rush down the sides of hills, and are rocky and steep, hence the scrambling. They form ravines because they're steep, and hence fast and erode quickly. Wealden ghylls, on the other hand, have much shallower gradients; they instead form ravines because the underlying rock is soft and easily erodable. The ravines are therefore steep-sided, but sheltered, and generally wooded (where a state of nature remains), and they're a large part of the distinctively chaotic geography of the area.


Along those lines, have we had 'force', in the riverine sense?

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Blog: http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/

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!

Does cwm fit in here?

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The conlanger formerly known as “the conlanger formerly known as Pole, the”.

If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.

Isn't that just a cirque?

Plenty of quaint monosyllabic technical terms in Scots law.

blench – the most common form of feudal tenure in the system's latter centuries, under which no or a nominal feuduty was payable.
croft – a small agricultural holding in northern or western Scotland to which the Crofting Acts apply. Determining croft status is very technical but the starting point is the precise amount of the rent in 1886.
eik /i:k/ – add-on to Confirmation (≈ Probate). I'm sure you can guess the etymology.
fee – ownership subject to a liferent.
feu /fju:/– an area of ground held of a superior under the feudal system of landownership.
flit – (of a tenant) to remove oneself from tenanted ground at the end of the tenancy.
ish – expiry date of a lease (corruption of exit, I believe).
poind /pɪnd/ (yes really) – to seize a (moveable) asset belonging to/possessed by your debtor and sell it to satisfy a debt owed to you.
seised /si:zd/ – the state of having a completed title to (i.e. being the owner of) land.
sist – to put on hold (a legal action); to bring in a new party to an action (a somewhat confusing homonymy).
tack – a lease. (OK, this is no more technical than "lease" but it is obscure.)
teind /tɛɪnd/ – a tithe exigible from a landowner for maintenance of the clergy (the obligation came with the land).
thirled – legally bound to use the mill belonging to your feudal superior to grind your flour.

Many of these are not as antiquated as you'd think. Almost all land in Scotland was held under feudal tenure under the feudal system was abolished in 2004 (no, really). Modern Scots lawyers have to use croft, eik, fee*, ish and sist on a regular basis.

Some more from bagpiping: birl, cran, grip and throw are all terms for different musical embellishments consisting of specific series of gracenotes.

Rugby also has a few: maul, ruck, scrum, touch try. Not obscure if you follow rugby but nonetheless technical, in the sense that there are detailed rules for working out when a situation falls within the definition.

*We also use fee in its everyday meaning an awful lot, of course.

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Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.
—Stephen R. Anderson

Málin eru höfuðeinkenni þjóðanna.
—Séra Tómas Sæmundsson

How is that pronounced? /saist/? /seist/? /sist/?

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The conlanger formerly known as “the conlanger formerly known as Pole, the”.

If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.

Sorry, should have realised that needed the IPA. Now edited in. It's the same as "seized".

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Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.
—Stephen R. Anderson

Málin eru höfuðeinkenni þjóðanna.
—Séra Tómas Sæmundsson

Shocked to see there are no linguistics terms on this list! What about calque and gloss? There must be more...

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Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.
—Stephen R. Anderson

Málin eru höfuðeinkenni þjóðanna.
—Séra Tómas Sæmundsson

I just saw perf for "performance (of a web application)":


Actually, looking at this paragraph, "RAM" could also count as it's pronounced /ræm/, and maybe "scale" as well (though this usage seems weird to me, I'm more used to the term "scalability"). "Crash" could also potentially count.


Stop, trill, voice, tone, phone, case, gap (when talking about relativization strategies), head, rime, stem, root, host (of a clitic), noun, fit (in pragmatics), type (in lexicography, i.e. a hapax legomenon), tag (in lexicography), phrase, theme, rheme.

The adjective bound.

The verb to rank (in optimality theory, note that as for the noun OT uses "a ranking" and not "a rank").

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ZBB Conlang Index (check first post)

troak

- to conduct barter of items not integral to the fishing industry, when one participant is Scottish and the other is a resident of Greenland.

streal

- arrow, or pupil of the eye

streel

- slut, or to be drawn along swaying in a zigzaging motion

snathe

- to prune

saithe

- a type of white fish (commonly sold in place of cod)

Unfortunately, I've forgotten the other word I'd been meaning to add here. What's the word for a shallow wooden dish used for holding milk?

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Blog: http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/

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!

Skeel?

Oh, I posted that one already, didn't I? Sorry.

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Blog: http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/

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!

Yes, but I forgot.