Words I'd like to see more of

[kassia]

anatiferous - producing ducks or geese, formerly said of trees and barnacles

All these geese! The esplanade is too darn anatiferous!

bobycinous - silky

I'd love to have socks made of her glistening and bobycinous hair.

conjobble - to conclusively resolve in discussion a contentious topic

The all remembered that last night they'd managed to conjobble the house finances, but in the morning their notes describing how appeared to be written in a foreign alphabet.

daedal - divers, various, variegated

The autumn hillsides have the daedal color of a calico cat.

enodation - the act of untying a knot

Somehow he managed to enodate his infidelity to his partner's satisfaction.

franion - a paramour, a boon companion, one bound by ties of affection rather than formal social commitment

Only his franion would take care of the widower's daughter for two years while he settled his other affairs, and then give her back to him.

geason - wonderful, awesome, fantastic

Her geason voice instituted a standing wave of shivers in my limbs.

horology - the science or art of measuring time or making timepieces

John Harrison never imagined that future horologists would employ a quartz crystal or a cesium atom.

illapse - a gradual immersion or entrance of one thing into another

The country's illapse into tyranny continued not unnoticed, but as yet unmitigated.

jejune - not nourishing, neither satisfying nor interesting, dull

Embarrassed that things had gone that far, she was dismayed to find his sex as jejune as his conversation.

kismet - destiny

It's google's kismet to develop true AI.

luculent - clear, transparent, lucid

His letter laid out his reasons for leaving with such luculence that her fury was voiceless.

muckle - to grab or grasp so as to be carried along with

The tired and brave rollerbladers would muckle onto passing trucks for assistance up hills.

nias - simple, silly, foolish

The nias joy of a summer afternoon can cheer even an emo's heart.

ouphe - an enigmatic fantastical creature

Too elegant for a goblin, too muscular for a fairy, the creature in her garden could only be an ouphe.

priapism - a prolonged and painful erection

The priapism of his tenure as department head elicited sympathy from the professors in other departments.

quean - a bold or impudent woman, generally a strumpet

Madonna has even managed to bequean motherhood.

rakehelly - wild, dissolute

Rakehelly hairdos are such the rage this season, it seems like heads have uniformly increased in girth.

shend - to ruin, spoil, disgrace, degrade

The introduction of Starbucks so shent central square, it was only a matter of time before Manray disappeared.

titubation - the act of stumbling

His drunkenness was characterized by such titubation that we were reassured that he couldn't maintain sufficient poise to actually reach his vehicle.

ustion - the act of burning or the state of being burned

Her insult made an ustion of his advances.

vertu - a knowledge of, or taste for, artistic objects; the quality of being artistic enough to interest a collector

DeCordova's art collection was so completely vertuless, Concord immediately liquidated the contents of the estate he had willed to the city for a museum.

waped - crushed by misery

The saint's work was to prove the existence of hope to the waped.

xanthous - yellow

That kid's so xanthous he won't even swim in water over his head.

yare - ready, dexterous, eager

Yare as a graduate student, the professor still tackled new topics with enthusiasm.

zeugma - a grammatic figure, when a verb agreeing with several subjects or an adjective with several nouns is referred to one explicitly and to the others by supplement

A most elegant metaphor, synedoche, zeugma, can make a successful poem out of the dullest of topics.

Comments

[zkzkz.livejournal.com]

Is this a quiz? I get 4/25.

(horology, jejune, kismet, priapism)

I feel Like I've seen ouphe and muckle before but I don't recognize the definitions.

[elbren]

O, I didn't mean to skip 'w'. I'll edit to fix that.

It wasn't meant to be a quiz. Nevertheless, you got almost all the more modern ones. Generally they're archaic, pulled from Samuel Johnson, the first English language dictionary.

I first heard "muckle" as a Polito-ism, and I haven't ever seen it in print with this sense.