Archive for New-to-me Words

xweex

I was wandering around in an internet rabbit hole just now, and came across two words that pleased me. Now that Twitter is called X, I’ve seen some people use the word xitter, and explain that x is pronounced like sh in some contexts. That doesn’t particularly appeal to me. But I just saw someone […]

tudum

I recently heard about Netflix’s fan event, known as Tudum. But I wasn’t sure how to pronounce that word, nor what it meant. Took me a while, but I eventually found out, from a 2021 article: Netflix subscribers know the "tudum" sound when they hear it, but maybe not how to spell it until now. […]

same shoe

Just saw someone on a BoardGameGeek forum use the phrase “I am in the same shoe with you,” which I don’t recall ever encountering before. I like it—it was immediately clear what it means—but now I’m curious about it. A Google search for [“same shoe with you”] shows only about 13,000 instances of that phrase […]

kenopsia and other obscure sorrows

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows “is a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.” For example, kenopsia is “the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually […]