Words of the Days

Filed under: Dictionaries, Resources
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Do all y’all subscribe to a Word of the Day? Which one?

My favorite is the OED, available for free as an RSS feed or by email (from The Oxford English Dictionary homepage. I like it in part because they often chose obscure, obsolete or regional words, quite often ones I have never heard of, and I can read the entire OED entry, with the etymology and quotations and pronunciation recording and whatnot. Sometimes the entry can lead me to a different word of even greater awesomeness. F’r’ex, today’s (in honor of Valentine’s, I assume) is lovewende, which is pretty good, but the suffix links to wrongwende, which is a lovely word.

I also subscribe to the Wordsmith A.Word.A.Day, which less frequently has utterly awesome words (in my opinion) but usually has an interesting weekly theme or even a puzzle. This week’s theme is People who became verbs and today’s word is hooverize, which evidently is entirely different from hoover as a verb, and a thing I did not know before today.

There are plenty of other ones that may be more to your taste! Wordnik glories in obscure words; today’s is peart. Merriam-Webster’s has a podcast; today’s is frolic. Dictionary.com aims for topicality; today’s is ship (in the fanfic use of the term). The New York Times version (in association with vocabulary.com) has a link to a recent article in which the word appears and a multiple-choice question about its usage; today’s is chaplain. Wiktionary’s has the ability to see and nominate future days’ words; today’s is philematology. The Oxford Living Dictionaries (different from the OED) aims for the living language; today’s is truthiness. The Haggard Hawks site tweets out several obscure words every day; today’s official word is luresome. There’s a specifically Grandiloquent Word on Facebook; today’s is billet-doux.

There are probably dozens more (in English—hundreds in other languages, I’m sure) that I’m missing. Is there a particularly clever or informative one? What’s the word on the street?

Thanks,
-Ed.

One Response to “Words of the Days”

  1. Jed

    I don’t tend to use word-of-the-day services, but I enjoy the words-of-the-day that you pass along.

    I’ve always felt like the new-to-me-words aspect of this blog (Neology/W&S) would get a little tiresome if I focused too much on it, so I’ve gone out of my way not to post too many in a row; but it belatedly occurs to me that if I had shifted the way I thought of it, I probably could’ve turned this blog into a word-of-the-day site. Oh, well; I like the direction we’re taking it better anyway.

    I just learned that someone I know writes a sort of a word-of-the-week blog: Friday words, by Mike Pope.

    reply

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