pandiculation
Pandiculation is "the act of stretching oneself." The context in which I encountered it indicated that the term is specifically used to refer to the sort of stretching one does...
Archive for New-to-me Words
buckraking
Apparently, "buckraking" refers to a journalist taking a lot of money for a speaking engagement, especially speaking to a group that has a particular agenda; such a payment may cast...
in the wind
Just happened across a remarkably poetic phrase that I've never heard used this way before. I was reading an article about a woman who stabbed an attacker; the woman fled...
axis mundi
The other day, I read a submission that included the phrase "Axis Mundi." There were a lot of other unfamiliar phrases in the story, so I figured it was just...
esculent
"Esculent" is apparently a synonym for "edible." It's been appearing in print since 1626, but I only just encountered it for the first time in Wikipedia....
snib
To "snib" a door is to fasten or bar it. Just came across it in a submission; turns out to have been used by J. M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle,...
organ of benevolence
I've never previously read A Christmas Carol. Happened across it in an iPhone edition recently, discovered that it's quite short (about 30,000 words—I had always assumed it was hundreds of...
go down a storm
Hadn't encountered this idiom before; apparently it means about the same thing as "go over well." (And not at all the same thing as "go down the storm drain.") I...
maieusiophilia
No word has any right to that many vowels. It means pregnancy fetishism....
fimbriation
You know how the Union Jack has those thin white borders on either side of each of the red stripes? Turns out there's a word for that: fimbriation, adding thin...