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A row of aquabobs
Word of the week: Sounding like some water-based children’s TV superhero, it’s actually a particularly apt and descriptive word for wintertime, being an 18th-century English Kent dialect noun meaning icicle
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Broticolous behaviour: raccoons
Word of the week: Mice, rats, spiders, foxes to raccoons, this obscure adjective, connected to the French noun broticole, this relates to any animal and insect species with a tendency to live around and alongside humans and their dwellings perhaps as scavengers, but also showing adaptability
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Meme of the time: four lads in jeans, Birmingham 2019
Word of the week: Aside from the literal outer layer of the ray-finned slippery fish, this evocative, slightly suggestive 19th-century slang means very tight trousers, while this week’s bonus word, excruciators, points to the experience of wearing very tight shoes
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A gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts a shadow
Word of the week: From the Ancient Greek, γνώμων (gnṓmōn)this pointed noun literally means one that knows or examines, but it is specifically the part of a sundial that casts a shadow as well as referring to other mathematical terms
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The Green Man
Word of the week: Two lesser known and very similar adjectives from the Latin word heder – hederaceous meaning resembling ivy, while hederigerent describing that which is dressed with or bedecked in ivy
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Jenticulate with the jentacular in the morning …
Word of the week: A tasty noun and an adjective all associated with the first meal of the day - one means to take breakfast, the other, with a variant spelling, describes anything related to that meal. Both derive from the Latin noun ientaculum, meaning a breakfast taken immediately on getting up
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Titania falls under a kalopsian spell in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Drawing by Charles Buchel, 1905
Word of the week: A noun describing distorted perception, meaning the delusion of seeing things as being more beautiful than they are, or through rose-tinted glasses
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Loweswater in the Cumbrian Lake District
Word of the week: A poetic word taken from the Latin lacus and French or Italan lacustre, this shimmering liquid of an adjective means relating to, formed in, living in, or growing in lakes, lake-like or positioned by a lake
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Illustration from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel by Gustave Doré
Word of the week: Huge, gigantic, enormous, voracious or insatiable, this colourful adjective derives from the character in the pioneering 16th-century French prose writer François Rabelais’s multiple volume work, Gargantua and Pantagruel
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Rucklety-tucklety cloth
Word of the week: This beautifully strange, rhythmic, rhyming, onomatopoeic English word hails from the 18th century, meaning crumpled or gathered up, often pertaining to cloth or clothing, and deriving from the word for crease – a ruckle
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Umbriphilous bluebells …
Word of the week: An adjective describing that which loves the shade, whether person, plant or otherwise, from the Latin, umbra, for shade and related to other derivatives, such as umbraphile, one who loves eclipses
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Vorlus-snorlus numbers
Word of the week: A strangely poetic, archaic Gloucestershire term meaning haphazard, pertaining to a a person who acts at random, possibly a corruption of the Latin term nolens volens, meaning neither willing nor unwilling, related to the word willy-nilly
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Pages 150-151 of Robert Recorde’s 1557 work The Whetstone of Witte describes the cubic term of zenzizenzizenzic
Word of the week: We return to the alphabet’s end with a word that’s as wonderfully weird, yet buzzily beautifully in sound as it is obscure and obsolete – an antiquated mathematical term meaning the eighth power of a number x, where x is multiplied by itself 8 times
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Callithumpian band
Word of the week: An evocative adjectival form of callithump, commonly used from 1836 in the American mid-West, describing a parade or band of noisemakers, but also originally an 18th-century British dialect noun for a group who made a rumpus on election days in southern England
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Romanian nai virtuoso Gheorghe Zamfir
Word of the week: This Romanian 17th-century panpipe is a mainstay of traditional folk and classical music, wide in range and resonant, it is made up of at least 20 pipes made of bamboo or reed in the diatonic scale of C or G, and emits a clean, distinctive sound
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The płock, płocka or fidel płocka
Word of the week: Also called płock, płocka or fidel płocka, a box-shaped six-string traditional Polish folk violin, without fingerboard or tailpiece, played vertically resting on the knee, and pairs of strings doubling pitch to bring a rich, resonant sound
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A variety of ronroco models
Word of the week: An Andean 10-string (5 doubles) form of mandolin, baritone or bass charango, this beautiful instrument was invented in the 1980s by Gonzalo Hermosa González, of the group Los Kjarkas from Cochabamba, Bolivia and has been used in many acclaimed film scores
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The curlew emits a wheeple
Word of the week: A Scottish dialect term dating back to at least the 19th century, meaning to utter a shrill, prolonged whistle or cry, often used to describe the high-pitched call of the curlew or plover
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Yaravi is a Pervuvian and high Andean song tradition
Word of the week: A broad term for a traditional, slow love song from Peru and other Andean and south American regions, often nostalgic and melancholy, stretching back to Inca culture, and sometimes also honouring the dead
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A dundun set of three drums from the Playing For Change Foundation
Word of the week: These evocative, onomatopoeic variants are generic names for a family of West African talking drums, particularly in the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, Guinea, talking drums that mimic human speech, rope-tuned and cylindrical with a rawhide skin at both ends, and played with a stick
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