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Words are still great.

Having devoured the remainder of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and started on The Scar, I thought I ought to share my continued collection of wordly wonders. (Don’t forget to check out the first half of the list!) Some novel, some familiar but infrequently encountered and marvelous, and all commendable to have in one’s vernacular.

• palimpsest
• bonhomie
• jurisprudence
• desquamate
• abbatoir
• ululate
• prurient
• efflorescence
• phalanx
• salvo
• etiolate
• scurrilous
• conniption
• rictus
• ordure
• priapic
• agglutination
• ossified
• puissance
• stygian
• protuberant
• obstreperously
• pudenda
• phlogistic
• opprobrium
• aggrandizement
• tinnitus

Oh, and I have to ask: Do you have any favored words–unusual, rare, or just plain fun to say? I’d like to discover more!

Words are great.

The vocabulary I habitually utilize hardly taps the well of words available in the English language. This isn’t news: most people fail to employ the full range of lexical jewels stashed in their thesauruses. As such, I’m delighted to announce that the book I’m reading now is full of fantastic words.

I’m reading Perdido Street Station. No lie: The man who wrote this book, China Miéville, has a lexicon just as prodigious as the world he paints. Here are a few novel and infrequently seen words I’ve espied thus far:

• detumescing
• veldt
• sciolist
• eidolon
• vertiginous
• aesthete
• bombastic
• moribund
• inveigled
• oneiric
• febrile
• necrotic
• pusillanimous
• bivouac
• chthonic
• dissident
• querulous
• inchoate
• paean
• patina
• desiccate
• moniker
• nacre
• solipsistic
• autotelic
• liminal
• deracinate
• sepulchral

Aren’t these splendid? I didn’t start taking notes on words until a hundred pages in, and I’ve got several hundred pages to go. Just think what wordly wonders I may encounter next!