Thesaurus day is your opportunity to reintroduce yourself to that best friend of writers, the thesaurus. Whether you’re looking for a new word to spice up your vocabulary, or looking for precisely the right nuance to add to a sentence or phrase, a Thesaurus can be there to help you. While many of us don’t use the great expanse of verbiage that’s available to us, the expanse of language really gives us an amazing ability to express ourselves with beauty and precision. Poets have long used words in their melodious composition of phrases to evoke the most powerful images, knowing that “very happy” is all good and well, but “exultant” brings about an entirely different scene to mind. I'm not sure that I'm going to be using 'exultant' much today.
With around 170000 word in common usage and perhaps up to 1 million words in the English language there's plenty to go at. I think it would be fun to reintroduce some obselete words. I particularly like the two person pronouns 'wit' and 'unk'; much more precise than 'we' and 'us' in those circumstances
Susie Dent - the Dictionary Corner on Countdown does a great Word of the day on Twitter. Fridays: Word of the day is 'quockerwodger' (19th century): a puppet-like individual whose strings of action are pulled by someone else.
It’s not a patch on Rogers Profanisaurus though is it.... Completely revised and updated, War and P*** is an epic romp through the foulest sewers of the English language. Inside its pages, you will find * Over 200 witty things to say before breaking wind * Over 300 witty things to say after breaking wind * 150 words for that bit of skin between your clackerbag and your nipsy So if you need to describe something that you just did in the toilet, something you just did while your significant other nipped to the shops, or simply need something to shout after dropping a car battery on your foot, remember … There’s a word for that in War and P...
Its a masterpiece to be sure. I am resisting the temptation to post a few examples for fear being told off...
According to Stephen Fry, and he is quite interesting, most modern languages have around 150,000 words in common parlance. English however has double this at around 300,000. The reason being that we generally have two words for everything due to our language having dual roots, teutonic (Anglo-Saxon) and romantic (French/Latin). An example is "loving" (Saxon) and "amorous" (French). The numbers are probably not quite exact but I like to think it's roughly true.
