L: Language

A lexigraph of “uproar” (46 entries):

uproar (n.) : an event that disturbs a pre-existing order; ranging from trivial misunderstandings to devastating violence; accompanied by sound. 1520s, German/Dutch: “to stir up.” Middle English, roar: “…a loud, continued sound.” Typically negative, but sometimes turns to humor from de-escalations and clarifica

The thesaurus sucks. You can always tell when a writer is using a thesaurus and random words are substituted to sound smart. The problem is the thesaurus has a bad architecture. It's flat. Everything connects to everything (the original sin), and it treats every synonym as equal (they're not!). Since we don't have a hierarchy of "core words" and "s

NOMINAL (thingness)

• noun : person, place, thing, idea (‘the dog”)

• pronoun: a signifier of an adjacent noun ( “The dog” > “it”)

• adjective : a modifier of a noun (“the happy dog”)

DYNAMIC (motion)

• verb : an action

• intransitive verb : an action that requires an object (“the dog ate the food”)

• transitive verb : a self-evident action (“the dog sleeps”)

The goal with the lexigraph is to create mini-dictionaries for each root word. The sum of root words are graspable by someone in elementary school. This would give them a map of all nuance behind the basic concepts they already know.

Maybe upper tiers of vocabulary are hard to pierce because we don’t have any frameworks to organize or remember. Con

Two other dictionary projects: The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) by Ambrose Pierce and The Devil’s Financial Dictionary (2016) by Jason Zweig. I’m more interested in the original; all the definitions are satirical and he wrote it over decades. It has around 1,600 words in the unabridged version.

I took three vocabulary tests, marked down the words I missed, and used AI to define them for me. There’s a certain appeal to charting words that are simply “unknown,” but just because its uncommon, doesn’t mean it’s worth using. For now, I think my public dictionary might just include more than necessary: it’s a reflection of my learning process.

This is the best vocabulary test I found (of the three I tried):

https://preply.com/en/learn/english/test-your-vocab

What to expect: first, they give you a grid of 50 words, ranging from really easy to really hard. I knew probably 90% of these. But then based on what you select, it gives you a second group of words that’s at the edge of your zone, wh

Check out the English Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). It is set of one billion words that is considered to be the best cross-section of usage in the English language. It has 8 domains—blogs, websites, movies, speeches, fiction, magazines, newspapers, academi research—that each cover ~125 million words. Bigger corpus’s do exist—the s

Emerson, “In Praise of Books”:

“Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion,—the raw material of possible poems and histories.”