Estimates of the size of an average person’s vocabulary range from a conservative 35,000 (which is still 4,000 more than William Shakespeare used) to 50,000 words, with knowledge of anything up to 75,000 words typical amongst people of higher education, and 100,000 or more characteristic of people like writers and editors, language scholars, crossword enthusiasts and professional Scrabble players. Given that the full twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains around a quarter of a million individual words – excluding inflected forms like plurals and a great many more technical and regional words that have never fully established themselves in print – even the highest of these estimates fall far short of the entire extent of the English language. Unsurprisingly then, dictionaries contain a great many words whose meanings are not widely known, of which ten that perhaps deserve to be more widely known are listed here.
Derived at length from knestis, the Ancient Greek word for the spine or backbone (and also, oddly, a cheese-grater), the acnestis is the part of the back that cannot be easily reached to scratch, typically said to be the region located between the shoulder blades. The acnestis is just one of a number of body parts whose proper names are rarely used or not widely known – the glabella, for instance, is the flat bare region of the forehead between the eyebrows; the philtrum is the small groove in the top lip just below the nose; the canthus is the corner of the eye, the point at which the eyelids come together; and the lunule is the proper name for the white, crescent-shaped mark found at the base of a fingernail or toenail.
An aglet, or aiglet, is the name of the metal tag or coated tip found at the end of a shoelace, intended to make the lace easier to thread through the eyeholes of the shoe. First recorded as early as the fifteenth century, the word was borrowed into English from French, and was originally a diminutive form of the French word for ‘needle’, aguille.
First recorded in English in the early 1700s, a borborygm or borborygmus is a rumbling sound produced in the stomach or intestines, typically caused by excess air or liquid as it is moved through the gut by peristalsis, the natural muscular contractions that push food through the digestive tract. The word is derived from the Ancient Greek name for this phenomenon, borborygmós, which is believed to be an example of onomatopoeia, invented in imitation of the rumbling noise itself.
Coined in the nineteenth century in line with the earlier seventeenth-century architectural term intercolumnation (describing the space between the pillars of a building), an interfenestration is the space formed between two windows; something described as interfenestral, ultimately, would be located in such a space. Derived from the Latin preposition inter, meaning ‘between’ or ‘amongst’, of similar origin are the equally obscure English words inter-arboration, referring to the interweaving of the branches of two trees; interdigitation, the ‘interlocking of the fingers of clasped hangs’; and both interanmian and inter-lacustrine, a pair of adjectives describing either land enclosed by or situated between two rivers or two lakes respectively.
Formed from the Greek word for ‘speech’, lalia, and the unusual Greek verb, khezo, meaning ‘to defecate’, lalochezia is proper name for the use of vulgar language as a means of emotional relief, and so can be used to describe the profanities with which a person instinctively comes out when, for instance, they are in pain or shocked. The word is related to the more widely accepted psychological term coprolalia, coined in the late nineteenth century by French physician Georges Gilles de la Tourette, which refers to the spontaneous and involuntary use of obscene language as associated with sufferers of Tourette’s syndrome.
Dating from the mid-seventeenth century in English, something described as nudiusterian occurred the day before yesterday; the word is based on the Latin phrase nunc dies tertius est, literally meaning ‘now is the third day’. The obsolete English term ereyesterday means precisely the same thing, whilst the adjective hestern or hesternal describes something that happened yesterday. Oppositely, the old word crastin is an alternative name for tomorrow; the overmorrow is the day after tomorrow; and the verb perendinate means to ‘put off until the day after tomorrow’. Despite their potential usefulness, all of these terms are very rarely used in English.
The peen is the dull, rounded end of a hammer, the end opposite the larger and heavier ‘head’ or ‘face’ used to strike nails. First recorded in the seventeenth century (but dating from the early sixteenth century as a verb meaning ‘strike with a hammer’), peen is believed to be of dialect origin in English, and perhaps originally derived from some long lost French or Scandinavian word.
Coined in an article published in the scientific journal Nature in 1964, the word petrichor is formed from the Greek word for ‘rock’ or ‘stone’, petra, and ichor, the name used for liquid said to flow through the veins of the gods in Greek mythology. The word describes the pleasant, earthy odour that can be smelt in the air following the first rainfall after a prolonged period of dryness, which is formed by an oil naturally produced by leaves during dry weather. Over time, this oil is absorbed into the soil and rocks under the leaves and is released by the rainwater into the air, creating the distinctive petrichor smell.
Derived via French from the Greek words phos, meaning ‘light’, and phainein, meaning ‘to appear’ or ‘to be revealed’, phosphenes are the ‘lights’ caused by artificial or mechanical stimulation of the retina when no actual light is present – that is to say, phosphenes are the ‘lights’ you see when you rub your eyes or close them tightly. The phenomenon is generally understood to be triggered by a slight increase in pressure within the eyeball when it is rubbed or closed, which automatically stimulates the receptive cells of the retina, thereby giving the illusion of light. Phosphenes can also be caused by stimulating the retina electronically, using electrodes to pass a current into the visual cortex of the brain, which can even create ‘lights’ in the eyes of some blind people.
A quaaltagh is the first person you meet after leaving your home. Dating from the nineteenth century, the word is one of only a handful to have been adopted into English from the Manx language of the Isle of Man, where local folklore maintains that the identity of the quaaltagh is of great importance to what is to come. This is especially true at or around Christmas and New Year, and indeed the term is also used as an alternative name for a ‘first-footer’, the first person to enter a house on New Year’s Day.