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

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.

WIP words: ag, agglomerate, agglutinate, aghast, agog, agronomy, -aholic, ail, ailron, aria, adjar, akimbo, ambiguity, anagesis, androcentrism, animism, dissemination, egotistical sublime, empiricism, exegesis, explication, foregrounding, formulaic, impressionism, ambry, Osiris, amerindian, amoret, amphisbaena, amrita.

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

Aldous Huxley apparently read 30 volumes of the encyclopedia page by page. That’s a serious ad nauseam commitment to binging reference material in chronological order. (FWIW, all these dictionary facts are coming from Dictionary Days by Ilan Stavans.

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”)

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.

Similar to how you start using the slang of your friends without realizing, you should be careful with who you read: you’ll start subconsciously adopting their mannerisms.

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