L: Language

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

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

• agnostic : unknowable.

• agoraphobia : fear of unfamiliar situations in public.

• agrarian : agre = acre, of the land.

• Amalthea’s horn : a myth about abundance / having everything you desire. Zeus’s nurse fed goat milk to an infant, snapped off it’s horn, and promised that Zeus will have a pampered life.

• amaranth : a fadeless flower.

• Amaurote : Thomas Moore

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

Literally doesn’t just mean “not figuratively,” but it means “of the text.” When you say literally, what you’re actually saying is: “regardless of what is spoken or done, we should refer to what is put down in writing at the source.”

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.

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.”

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

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.