FreeRice

I came across the FreeRice website earlier, which aims to boost your vocabulary whilst donating grains of rice to charity.  You’re given a word and are asked to select which of four possibilities is the correct meaning of the given word.

I was given footle, which I correctly guessed means ‘waste time’.  So now I can say I’m footling instead of procrastinating if I like.

Coined specially for me:

Psychophant

I like it very much.

When I find a suitable use for it, I will use it. Lots.

I came across a new word just now (new to me), which is hebesphenomegacorona, which is “[a]n irregular solid figure with 21 faces, 18 of them triangular and the other three square” (from World Wide Words).

1. Source: Hebesphenomegacorona — from MathWorld–A Wolfram Web Resource by Eric W. Weisstein at Wolfram Research.
2. Source: Hebesphenomegacorona by Michael Quinion at World Wide Words on March 26, 2005.

My brain is bloogy.

Yes, I did just make it up, but I’m a morphologist, so I’m allowed :p

I just coined a new word - at least Google comes up with no hits for it and asks me if I meant dysmemorrh[o]ea, which I didn’t. My new word is dysmemorial, which I claim to be because my memory doesn’t work at all well. The OED Online (2nd edition) doesn’t have it in; the nearest word it comes up with is dysmenorrhagia, which precedes the entry for dysmemorrhoea and means the same thing. Do I get a prize?

Mind, the OED also says that the prefix dys- is usually followed by a word of Greek origin, to stay in keeping with the origin of the prefix, so I will now recoin my word as dysmnemonic and search for that on Google. No, it asks did I mean usemnemonic, a computer function name by the looks of it.

The last time I thought I’d coined a new word, I discovered it already existed (by doing a Google search, of course). That word was dysnumeric, which I also claim to be.

Serbo-Croatian dalek, ‘far and distant thing’ (source: Wikipedia)

What do you mean, who? It’s me!