17 words about words
There are an estimated 750,000 words in the English language —but the average college-educated American has a vocabulary of up to 80,000 words.
That leaves hundreds of thousands of undiscovered words.
Let’s explore words about language and writing. How many of these do you know?
Definitions are from Dictionary.com, Urban Dictionary, Wikitionary and Oxford Dictionaries:
1. Cheville: an unnecessary word used to complete a verse.
2. Cledonism: avoidance of words thought to be unlucky.
3. Epeolatry: the worship of words.
4. Hadeharia: constant use of the word “hell.”
5. Hapax: a word that occurs only once in a given text.
6. Hypernym: a word representing a class of words or things (color is a hypernym of green).
7. Largiloquent: talkative.
8. Lethologica: the inability to remember a word.
9. Loganamnosis: obsession that occurs when trying to recall forgotten words.
10. Logogogue: a word expert.
11. Logogriph: a riddle in which a word is found from the letters of other words.
12. Onomatomania: a desire or compulsion to use certain words.
13. Onomatophobia: the fear or dread of certain words or names.
14. Pauciloquent: of few words; speaking little.
15. Trionym: a name consisting of three words.
16. Verbile: a person whose mental imagery consists of words.
17. Wordbound: inability to find expression in words; constrained or limited by words.
What favorite terms would you add to the list, PR Daily readers?
This post was first published on Ragan Communication’s PR Daily.
