Comments by mollusque

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  • Appears to be an typographical or OCR error for Pleurothallis.

    August 17, 2010

  • The final aim of Jameson's project is to offer a theory of the fractured nature of postmodern or technological subject in terms of an equally disfigured and dehumanized multinational capitalism. For this reason "older theories of the sublime" are dragged out in an act of pseudopanic to explain the subject "blissed out before feats of postmodern commodification".

    --Vijay Mishra, 1994, The Gothic Sublime, p. 26

    August 17, 2010

  • Oops, sorry.

    August 16, 2010

  • Thanks ruzuzu and hernesheir!

    August 16, 2010

  • Thanks, ruzuzu! It's been a long time since anything has turned up for this list.

    August 15, 2010

  • A nominal number (sometimes called a categorical number) is a number you use for identification only. It doesn't matter what the value of the number is.

    --Barry Schoenborn and Bradley Simkins, 2010, Technical Math For Dummies, p. 39

    August 15, 2010

  • The best I've found in the noun-verb category is pistolwhip. Some others are punchy too: sandblast, chainsmoke, gatecrash, slamdance.

    August 15, 2010

  • This is a great list, madmouth. Lots of words look like they fit but don't: feedback, blowhole. How about list for noun-verb compounds where the result is a verb: windowshop, breastfeed, skydive?

    August 14, 2010

  • Given the meaning of "uremia" (a form of blood poisoning), "polyuremia" should not be a synonymy of "polyuria" (excessive urination). Uremia is much more likely to result from too little urination than too much. It's not clear that anyone has used it in the sense of "multiple forms of uremia in one individual", which is what it would be expected to mean.

    This usage in Ullmann's Encyclopedia of industrial chemistry 24: 258 (1988) might be correct: "Premature coronary and/or circulatory arrest and/or a kidney malfunction which results in anuria and uremia are possible. Eventual transition to polyuremia can occur. Death occurs in the coma or through kidney failure."

    But I wouldn't expect the word to be used in a chemical encyclopedia, unless it already existed in the medical literature. The couple of occurrences I've found there look like errors for "polyuria". For example in the abstract of this article in PubMed, "polyuria" and "polyuremia" seem to be used interchangeably.

    August 13, 2010

  • Thanks for the gracious message, hernesheir, and for the euryvocalic suggestions. Polyuremia is a tough call. I'll comment further there.

    August 13, 2010

  • Sorry, hernesheir, I don't agree. In the first example you posted, "cinaceous" is demonstrably a misspelling of "vinaceous", since the quotation was copied from an earlier source. The second quotation comes from a source that uses "vinaceous" 26 times and "cinaceous" only one. Since "c" is next to"v" on the keyboard, the simplest explanation is that it is a typo for "vinaceous".

    The English color words from Latin cinis, cineris follow the usual pattern of being derived from the genitive form, not the nominative: cinereal, cinerous and cineritious.

    August 12, 2010

  • The wrongest step of all is to be so eaten up with your own calamity as to be led into crime. The temple of your body is sacred; it was not yours to give, it is not yours to destroy.

    --Oliver Lodge, 1921, "The Ethics of Suicide", The Fortnightly 110: 597

    August 11, 2010

  • *Rubs eyes*

    August 11, 2010

  • Thanks for the trove of new finds, hernesheir! I've added an acknowledgement of your help on the euryvocalic list. I couldn't confirm two of the names' appearing in print (Copestylum kahli and Hybomitra vulpes), possibly because they are subsequent combinations that have occurred only in databases so far.

    I hit 49 languages on the polyglot list yesterday, making 50 (including English) in which panvocalics are known.

    August 10, 2010

  • The draperies were what Kipling calls 'harumphrodite' and the features a smear, which is as it should be in inspirational paintings.

    --Dion Fortune, 2003, The Sea Priestess, p. 83

    August 10, 2010

  • The substance of it abecedarium'>the abecedarium seldom varied. First came a cross, a charm "against the devil that may be in the letters"—hence the term "Christ-cross" or "criss-cross" row; next two alphabets, one of small letters and one of capitals; then three rows of syllables, those mystic incantations that sounded in every American schoolroom down to very recent times—"abebib" and "babebibobu"; and last, "In the Name of the Father" and the Lord's Prayer. And there the child's education usually ended.

    --Morris S. Bishop, 1915, Catholic Educational Review 10: 23

    August 9, 2010

  • Thanks for the panvocalic guidance, Pro.

    August 9, 2010

  • Slovak for "ham and eggs".

    August 8, 2010

  • Wow! Thanks for the page images, Prolagus (now capitalized I see). Looking through the Italian panvocalics, I find that we've listed about a third of them already. Could you advise about the acceptability of the following?

    "babebibobu": word or sound effect?

    "assessorucci": appears on some websites, but not in Google Books (except in the book in question).

    "apicolture": misspelling of "apicoltore"?

    "caposervitù": appears only in lists of Italian panvocalics

    "avvolgiture": should this be "avvolgitore"?

    "arreionu" and "arresignolu": proper Sardinian?

    "centomilaun": madeupical?

    "uranometri": madeupical?

    Thanks, M.

    August 8, 2010

  • Hi bilby, I seem to have found an Indonesian panvocalic, in Museum dan Anak-anak. Do you think "museografi" qualifies as naturalized in Indonesian?

    August 8, 2010

  • John, more testing shows that "move" still does not work if the word to be moved has a space, diacritic mark, or other special character.

    August 8, 2010

  • I'm not sure what you mean. As far as I know, there is only one original genus in which edwardsi Van Duzee, 1930 was introduced, and whether the genus is paraphyletic is not relevant to the spelling of the specific name. Also, the nomenclatural rules do not require "authority"; they can be applied by anyone who has an interest. In this case the rule is Article 32.2 of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature: "The original spelling of a name is the 'correct original spelling', unless it is demonstrably incorrect as provided in Article 32.5." There is no doubt that Chrysotus edwardsi is the correct spelling.

    August 8, 2010

  • You surmise correctly, the original spelling is "edwardsi". Why didn't you list that spelling?

    August 8, 2010

  • He told me about the chamomiles, the hellebores, the petunias, the sweet williams, the wild pinks, the anemones, the sedums, the candytufts, the peonies, the Syrian opals, the daturas, the flowers that live for only a season, the ones that come back year after year, and the ones that beam from dawn to dusk, displaying their delicate corollas of rosy or mauve convolvulus, only to close abruptly at nightfall, as if a wrathful hand had squeezed their velvet petals and choked them.

    --Philippe Claudel, 2007, By a Slow River, p. 111

    August 6, 2010

  • I undressed and laid my outer clothes near the fire as well. They produced the scorched odors of woods and suint that mixed with those of the priest.

    --Philippe Claudel, 2007, By a Slow River, p. 110

    August 6, 2010

  • He looked at me, smiling, now as ever since our talk with that priestly gaze designed to reach in and pull out our souls like a cooked snail from its shell.

    --Philippe Claudel, 2007, By a Slow River, p. 112

    August 6, 2010

  • And old Mrs. Marchoprat, that gossip, immediately closed her door, pulled the iron grate shut, and ran to report to her dear friend Mélanie Bonnipeau, a pious bonneted biddy who spent most of her time scanning the street from her low window . . . .

    --Philippe Claudel, 2007, By a Slow River, p. 34

    August 6, 2010

  • The individual who is balanced in mind and body is in a state of eutonia, which no environmental irritation can disturb for any length of time.

    --Peter Dosch and Mathias Dosch, 2007Manual of Neural Therapy According to Huneke, p. 212

    August 6, 2010

  • Try dodman.

    August 5, 2010

  • Thanks for the Icelandic panvocalic!

    August 3, 2010

  • Thanks, John. It's working now, except when the word has diacritic marks or other special characters.

    August 2, 2010

  • Thanks for the fixes, john and tonytam.

    Any progress on the "move" function?

    Another bug to report: I couldn't delete my "auieo" tag on mandt's guillemot when I changed my listing to Mandt's Guillemot. I changed a bunch in similar fashion (lowercase to uppercase), but that was the only one I couldn't delete. When I click on the "x", all it does is add "#" to the URL.

    August 2, 2010

  • Is there a list for homophonic place names?

    August 1, 2010

  • The "Wordnik is" statistics at the top of the Zeitgeist page are incorrect. Also, the "move' function to transfer a word from one to another is not working.

    Any ideas on the subscript/superscript problem?

    July 31, 2010

  • Umbrage, bilbyo?

    July 31, 2010

  • Balti and tandoori dishes at Amsterdam's only balti house come in big portions, which are mildly seasoned to suit the average Dutch palate.

    --Time Out Amsterdam, 2005, p. 141

    July 31, 2010

  • An interesting kind of dictionary word: its first occurrence seems to be in a French-English dictionary from 1836, as a translation of "âpreté. "Scabiousness" is properly formed in English, but seems not to be used, perhaps because "scabbiness" is used instead.

    July 31, 2010

  • The hairs covering the leaves consist of a simple row of cells, and show a curious disposition of the tannin; as a rule, the alternate cells are tannigerous, the intervening ones have chlorophyll and are without tannin; the proximal cell of the hair may have tannin, or be a chlorophyll-cell.

    --Spencer Le M. Moore, 1891, The Journal of the Linnean Society, Botany 27: 529

    July 31, 2010

  • . . . in Cynomorium coccineum the ovule is destitute of a micropyle, tho pollen-tube finding its way to the embryo-sac through a vacuolated and amyligerous cone of tissue in the micropylar region of the ovule.

    --Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society 1900(1): 691

    July 31, 2010

  • Can anyone offer an etymology for this word?

    July 31, 2010

  • The aphernousli, or arkennousli of Switzerland, Trent, Carniola, & c. might probably thrive to great advantage in our bleak, barren, rocky, mountainous tracts of land . . . .

    --Walter Harte, 1764, Essays on Husbandry, p. 102

    July 31, 2010

  • We agree with Mr. Whitley in deeming the Pinus Cembra, or aphernousli as it is called (we know not the meaning), a tree of great beauty . . . .

    --The Gardener's Magazine 9(45): 475 (1833)

    July 31, 2010

  • What happened to the Blog link at the top of the Zeitgeist page?

    July 30, 2010

  • The citation being "true" on its face is equivalent to the poor taxonomy option. That would mean that "pseudomantid" was a term used by orthopterists, and the writer of the Collier's article thought that "pseudomantids" were raphidopterans. In support of this interpretation, an Encyclopedia Americana article from 1951 say Raphidiodea have "the appearance of mantids". However, an entomologist would not normally use the word pseudomantid unless there were a family Pseudomantidae. There is no such family (only the tribe Pseudomantini), and there is no evidence that members of the genus Pseudomantis are called pseudomantids. On the other hand, I have not been able to find a raphidopteran genus beginning with "pseudo-", so there is no obvious word for "pseudomantid" to be an error for.

    July 30, 2010

  • The quotation is about Raphidiodea, which is now known as Raphidioptera, whereas Pseudomantis is part of Orthoptera. These are different orders of insects, so it is not true that raphidiodeans are sometimes called "pseudomantids". It's not clear what the error was: a malaprop, a misspelling, or poor taxonomy.

    July 30, 2010

  • Doesn't seem to have appeared in print yet; in online occurrences the "l" is an OCR error for " ' " or "/".

    July 29, 2010

  • Variant of "bibacious".

    July 29, 2010

  • Transcription error for "sebaceous" or "liliaceous" depending on the context (sebaceous cyst or tumour; liliaceous plant or tribe).

    July 29, 2010

  • Variant spelling of "ceraceous"; in some contexts an OCR error for "veracious".

    July 29, 2010

  • OCR error for "tenacious".

    July 29, 2010

  • Misspelling of molluscous.

    July 29, 2010

  • Menacing; variant spelling of minacious.

    July 29, 2010

  • Subscript and superscript html codes don't work in Wordnik.

    July 29, 2010

  • Incubation of the enzyme with an excess of the strong reduc- tant dithionite (40 electrons/mol enzyme) resulted in two new Mov EPR signals (pseudorapid split and unsplit Mov signals).

    --Astrid Sigel and Helmut Sigel, 2002, Molybdenum and Tungsten: Their Roles in Biological Processes, p. 389

    July 29, 2010

  • Any citations?

    July 29, 2010

  • Typographical error for "pseudoelastic"; most works in which "pseudolastic" appears also use "pseudoelastic".

    July 29, 2010

  • Democracy isn't always democratic. Sometimes it's aristocratic, sometimes it's plutocratic, even pseudocratic sometimes.

    --Kevin J. Wetmore, 2003, Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre, p. 190

    July 29, 2010

  • Actually, I didn't start the convowel tagging, Bri did.

    July 29, 2010

  • Misspelling of pseudophakic in ophthalmological contexts. "Pseudo-phatic" appears correct in other context, but a citation without a hyphen hasn't been found (yet).

    July 29, 2010

  • OCR error for pseudobranchial.

    July 29, 2010

  • Misspelling of neurogenic, usually in the context of the neurogenic theory of the heart beat.

    July 29, 2010

  • The three-story mute concrete surfaces left behind are an antihouse, a public presentation of the interior living space that at the same time asserts and denies domesticity.

    Landscape architecture 86: 81 (1996)

    July 29, 2010

  • The plate is further incubated with alkaline phosphatase-conjugated antimouse immunoglobulin and color is developed.

    --Patrick C. Roche, 1996, G proteins, p. 195

    July 29, 2010

  • Elderly pneumoniacs have lower survival rates, particularly those with other medical problems.

    --James McManus, 2006, Physical: an American Checkup, p. 227

    July 29, 2010

  • Misspelling of pleurodiran in some scientific papers on turtles.

    July 29, 2010

  • Thanks for the birdwirds, hernesheir! I will eventually root them out of your lists, so don't feel obligated, but I do appreciate the updates of your finds, particularly the new euryvocalic patterns. Is there a particular kind you want me to flag for you?

    Belated congratulations on pushing past 2000 convowel patterns. Quite a jump from 25 days ago!

    July 29, 2010

  • All cedulas are approved by a multi-party committee, one of several steps in the cedulation process where the political parties will be allowed to vet voter registration lists.

    --John Clements, 1996, Clements' International Report, p. 72

    July 28, 2010

  • Great! Wordnik has three panvocalic Icelandic phrases, but no single words yet: "hundrað og einn", "hundrað og tveir", and "ef svo býður við að".

    July 28, 2010

  • Define the multivariate quotential derivative recursively starting with the rightmost ones . . . .

    --Michael Trott, 2006, The Mathematica Guidebook for Symbolics, p. 332

    July 28, 2010

  • The first is caused by aerobic actinomyces and the second the maduromycetic group.

    --Annual Review of Biochemical and Allied Research in India, 25: 85 (1954)

    July 28, 2010

  • When knower and knowable are fused into a uniflavored essence, that in truth is the immaculate Wisdom.

    --José Pereira, 1976, Hindu Rheology: a Reader, p. 382

    July 28, 2010

  • There must be mass outbreaks of bovilexia there!

    July 27, 2010

  • See tonguebanging.

    July 27, 2010

  • Does it have matching shelltub?

    July 27, 2010

  • Not chestnut budcreep! Where will phenology lead us next?

    July 26, 2010

  • Thanks, yarb! I'd never have predicted "bungaloidest"!

    July 26, 2010

  • Misspelling of arsenious.

    July 26, 2010

  • Many intellectuals are motivated by different desires—not the accretious ones of having ready access to fashion, beer, autos, and appliances, but the longing for an infinitely deferred utopia . . . .

    --Timothy Brennan, 1997, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, p. 216

    July 26, 2010

  • . . . vasculometric analysis evinced that the RT-induced

    pathophysiology is revealed at the level of the cranial microcirculation.

    --Sophie Desmons et al., 2009, Calcified Tissue International 84(5)

    July 26, 2010

  • These roughhaired guinea pigs are sometimes called "tufted" or"rosetted," because their hair grows in a pattern of rosettes.

    --Helen Piers and Matthew M. Vriends, 1993, Taking Care of your Guinea Pigs, p. 6

    July 26, 2010

  • An analysis of measurement errors in mandibulometry with special reference to their influence on the results of inter-population relationship analysis.

    --K. Koizumi and M. J. Kouchi, 1988, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Tokyo 96: 339.

    July 25, 2010

  • When Wordnik has no definition for a word, it brings up comments instead, with a link to "older comments" if there are more than two. But the link brings up younger comments, not older (see galenious). It probably is best to display the oldest first, since that's the one most likely to be an example.

    July 25, 2010

  • True, I don't.

    July 25, 2010

  • I just found that Enciclopedia dei giochi, by Giampaolo Dossena (1999), has a list of Italian panvocalics. Unfortunately, only a snippet view is available. Have you heard of this book?

    July 25, 2010

  • This arteriolus anastomosed into a precapillary with wider lumen without muscles in the wall, and ramified into alveolar capillaries in the lung-tissue surrounding the bronchus . . . .

    --Acta anatomica 7: 21 (1949)

    July 25, 2010

  • Neither of the supposed Producti appears to belong to that genus; one of them is certainly an equirostral Spirifer . . . .

    --E. Forbes, 1847, Journal of the Royal Geological Society of Ireland 3: 262

    July 25, 2010

  • He waved them away, his wheeling skull pressed for coolness against the glass of the quarterwindow.

    --Cormac McCarthy, 1992, Suttree, p. 76

    July 25, 2010

  • Placement of the side nodes at the midpoint rather than the quarterpoint was adopted to reduce the spurious unloading and to allow larger load increments.

    --Gerald W. Wellman et al, 1988, Fracture Mechanics: Eighteenth Symposium, p. 545

    July 25, 2010

  • I have found that many scientists who think they are newfound friends of qualia turn out to use the term in ways no self- respecting qualophile philosopher would countenance.

    --Daniel Clement Dennett, 2005, Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, p. 87

    July 25, 2010

  • If you are a qualiphobe, this book will not convince you of the legitimacy of qualitative methods.

    --Richard E. Boyatzis, 1998, Transforming Qualitative Information: Thematic Analysis and Code Development, p. viii

    July 25, 2010

  • There is a purity to this kind of Super Crunching that is hard for even quantiphobes to ignore.

    --Ian Ayres, 2008, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart, p. 86

    July 25, 2010

  • Don't depend on mindless rankings devised by quantophiles who don't know econometrics and don't believe in judgment . . . .

    --Deirdre N. McCloskey, 2003, Eastern Economic Journal 29(2)

    July 25, 2010

  • I thought you'd like it, hernesheir. The preferred spelling is probably "galenous", but that has fewer than ten hits in Google Books (excluding Galenous = Galen), so I figured "galenious" was a legitimate variant. Finding a previously overlooked aeiou word is particularly satisfying.

    July 25, 2010

  • At the upper extremity, looking directly toward the perpendicular face of the mountain that rises up to the hight of three thousand feet, you see, plainly marked, a stratum of galenious rock in the form of a perfect horseshoe.

    --Harry T. Gause, 1871, Journal of a Summer Trip to Colorado and the Rocky Mountains, p. 102

    July 25, 2010

  • The large chiroptivorous bull-dog bat (Phyllostomus hastatus) is much larger and more fearsome-appearing than the vampires, but it is not dangerous to man or to most other animals except small bats.

    --Julian Haynes Steward, 1950, Handbook of South American Indians, p. 365

    July 25, 2010

  • See chiroptivorous.

    July 25, 2010

  • Yes--I plundered a few for Color adjectives.

    July 24, 2010

  • Thanks, John. Tags are working as hoped. I can be restrictive in my tags, and hernesheir can be permissive. To me, this is the stuff of lexicography. I consider "temarious" to be a misspelling of "temerarious", so I don't tag it with "eaiou", but hernesheir might want to. Who's to say it won't someday overtake "temerarious" as the preferred spelling? Wordnik allows variants and misspellings to be cross-referenced and discussed, so those who encounter them can reach their own decisions.

    July 23, 2010

  • Pounce!

    July 23, 2010

  • Thanks, Deborah. I put them on Triads 2, since the sound is what's important with that cheer.

    July 23, 2010

  • Oh yes, human life is very tolerable on the top of an omnibus in Holborn, when the policeman holds up his arm and the sun beats on your back, and if there is such a thing as a shell secreted by man to fit man himself here we find it, on the banks of the Thames, where the great streets join and St Paul's Cathedral, like the volute on the top of the snail shell, finishes it off.

    --Virginia Woolf, 1922, Jacob's Room

    July 23, 2010

  • Rhinolalia is altered speech caused by abnormal airflow through the nose during phonation. It may an organic or functional cause. While it is technically correct to distinguish between altered voice sounds (rhinophonia) and altered sound production (rhinolalia), both terms are often used interchangeably. Several types of rhinolalia are distinguished based on the voice sound . . . .

    --Rudolf Probst, Gerhard Grevers and Heinrich Iro, 2006, Basic Otorhinolaryngology: a Step-by-step Learning Guide, 401

    July 23, 2010

  • Hyperacoustic musicotherapy counteractingly psychostimulates milquetoasty subpersonality.

    July 23, 2010

  • Thanks for the Eckler sentence, oroboros. I wonder if it's possible to construct a six word sentence with euryvocalics. I nominate psychostimulate as the verb.

    Can I pitch pitch for your Autantonyms lists?

    July 22, 2010

  • This LLTM analysis using main effects and pseudomain effects showed a conditional likelihood . . .

    --Mark Wilson and George Engelhard, 1996, Objective Measurement: Theory into Practice, p. 379

    July 22, 2010

  • Any examples that are clearly not misspellings of neuromantic?

    July 22, 2010

  • Possibly an error for pseudopodian.

    July 22, 2010

  • It's a misspelling of pleurovisceral.

    July 22, 2010

  • Hernesheir, both my comments were jokes. Surely the panvocalic form is preferable.

    July 22, 2010

  • Seems to be hyphenated in the original.

    July 22, 2010

  • Don't you prefer malocclusive?

    July 22, 2010

  • Don't you mean malocclusive?

    July 22, 2010

  • I think "ceratious" and "ceratiously" are OCR errors for vexatious and vexatiously.

    July 20, 2010

  • How are things out there in leftfield, bilby?

    July 20, 2010

  • My request (from six months ago) to restore the Wordie ability to be able to link to one's own tags is getting urgent. Hernesheir and I are both tagging vowel patterns for panvocalics, but we have different criteria for what should be listed, and in some cases what should be tagged. I'd like to be able to link to my own tags. Is it possible to change from relative links like

    http://www.wordnik.com/tags/aeiou?yours=

    to absolute links like

    http://www.wordnik.com/tags/aeiou?u=mollusque

    The latter worked on Wordie, but on Wordnik it gives the same result as the "Everyone's" link.

    July 20, 2010

  • Are you explicitly collecting euvocalic misspellings and misprints? If so, maybe you should have a separate list for them.

    July 20, 2010

  • Transcription error for vinaceous, corrected in a subsequent edition:

    "Similar to C. fasciata, but with the tail-band wanting or only faintly indicated, the general coloration lighter and more uniform, the vinaceous tints, especially, being more or less replaced by bluish-ash.

    --Elliott Coues, 1903, Key to North American Birds, p. 710

    July 19, 2010

  • Transcription error for olivaceous.

    July 19, 2010

  • Typographical error for vinaceous, copied from:

    . . . lower border of flanks dull vinaceous buff, sometimes varying to pale cream buff with a slight vinaceous tinge; . . .

    --E. W. Nelson, 1909, North American Fauna 29: 138

    July 19, 2010

  • Misspelling of violaceous.

    July 19, 2010

  • As in arachibutyrophobia.

    July 19, 2010

  • Still a misspelling.

    July 19, 2010

  • Misspelling of violaceous.

    July 19, 2010

  • This is an error for "liliaceous" by Turner in translating Marcel de Serres (1829: 22), "que l'on peut rapprocher des palmiers et des liliacées arborescentes".

    July 19, 2010

  • They're usually called pilosebaceous follicles, but pilaceous seems properly formed from pilus.

    July 19, 2010

  • Isn't this a misspelling of tiliaceous?

    July 19, 2010

  • This looks like the original has a misspelling of setaceous.

    July 19, 2010

  • This latent period is described as the phase of preacoustic perception and is a physiologic condition of hearing.

    --Archives of Otolaryngology 35: 439 (1942)

    July 19, 2010

  • Any citations for apervious? It shows up in Google Books and Google Scholar, but always seems to be an OCR error, or to mean Pervious Area (A subscript pervious) (the html sub tag isn't working).

    July 19, 2010

  • MARIACHIS - strolling musicians dressed in traditional Spanish costumes who play traditional Mexican music, usually on guitars, guitarones (big bass guitars), violins, and sometimes trumpets.

    --Michelle Motoyoshi, 1999, Mexicans in California, p. 58

    July 19, 2010

  • Thanks for the updates! I think both wyes should be tagged for Xyrichtys melanopus. Since it's not euryvocalic, I don't count it as having one of the 720 arrangements of the six vowels.

    July 19, 2010

  • He assumed that this neuronal control mechanism is provided by a closed circuit (gamma ring) comprising ventricolumnar cells, peripheral motor nerve, muscle, receptors, efferent sensory nerve, and again ventricolumnar cells.

    --Yoshiharu Akishige, 1977, Psychological Studies on Zen 2: 133

    July 18, 2010

  • This word seems to have been first introduced in dictionaries. It's in MW3 and goes back to at least 1916 (The American Illustrated Medical Dictionary, 8th ed., p. 1017), but it seems not to have escaped until recently.

    July 18, 2010

  • In the present study, rat dorsal root ganglion sensory neurons and ventricolumna motoneurons following isolated culture in vitro were used to investigate synergistic effects of NGF, CNTF and GDNF on survival and growth of neurons.

    --J. Chen, et al., 2010, Advances in Medical Sciences 55: 32

    July 18, 2010

  • You seem to have developed the knack as well! Before I noticed your comment on my profile I'd already pulled creatinous, aneuronic, pyrometallurgist (I had pyrometallurgic], physioneural, and polymetallurgic (a new euryvocalic pattern) off the Zeitgeist page .

    I passed on taurodine (as explained there), and used the capitalized form of pleuronian (and Pleuronia as well).

    July 18, 2010

  • Smells like a misspelling, but of what, I don't know. Maybe taurosine, but that's extremely rare too, and at least in some contexts may be a misspelling of tyrosine or taurine.

    That's the problem in the outer stratosphere of the search for panvocalics. Rare words can be hard to distinguish from errors (see wasteliquor for an example).

    July 18, 2010

  • I wasn't aware of the term ochrea. The normal adjective for it seems to be ochreate, but I can see that ochreaceous is used as well.

    July 18, 2010

  • Why not? Zircon, epidote, staurolite and sphene are common minerals that are often discussed in the same paper (example), and stauroline occurs in a paper in a journal where English is not a primary language.

    July 18, 2010

  • Should this be pervenche?

    July 18, 2010

  • Misspelling of ochraceous.

    July 18, 2010

  • Isn't this just a misspelling of staurolite?

    July 18, 2010

  • Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

    --Nicholson Baker, 1988, The Mezzanine, p. 123, footnote

    July 17, 2010

  • As the business becomes more complex the tiny wires must be constantly watched. Every wire must have back of it the propulsative power and knowledge of a human mind.

    --Joe Mitchell Chapple, National Magazine 29: 461

    July 17, 2010

  • But for all our propugnative activities there were moments of stress and pressure so that I lost my hat, suffered a torn coat and received a blow that made blood flow from my cheek, at which honorable sign of combat I knew pride and mental serenity.

    --Charles J. Finger, 1930, Seven horizons, p. 157

    July 17, 2010

  • Legislatures and official agencies take steps to convey the law they adopt to addressees via one or more of a variety of promulgative devices.

    --Robert S. Summers, 2006, Form and Function in a Legal System: a General Study, p. 378

    July 17, 2010

  • We have dilated on the subject of the compurgative ordeal, because we consider it as the basis upon which our criminal jurisprudence has been erected.

    --The Edinburgh Review 31: 131 (1818)

    July 17, 2010

  • All flocculative and biological treatment processes produce quantities of sludge, irrespective of what some manufacturers may claim.

    --Bill Bennett and Graham Cole, 2003, Pharmaceutical Production: an Engineering Guide, p.296

    July 17, 2010

  • Using a literary trick we may say that what was written so far represents scientists' everyday knowledge of everyday knowledge. As a result, such analyses are of postulative nature and do not result in empirical studies.

    --Piotr Buczkowski, 1991, The Social Horizon of Knowledge, p. 177

    July 17, 2010

  • At a high level, wobulation is sort of like interlaced video because it relies upon the persistence of vision, meaning you see something longer than it's actually in front of you, especially when images are changing very rapidly, like every 1/60 of a second. A DLP chip with wobulation uses another mirror that moves even faster(once every 1/120 of a second, or faster) to re-aim the pixels from individual mirrors on the DLP chipset.

    --Danny Briere and Pat Hurley, 2007, HDTV for Dummies, p. 267

    July 17, 2010

  • The absence of nodulative ability in these three species, in the face of its presence in the other 37 species of Acacia . . . particularly as none of the three species was found to have the coloured roots often associated with a lack of nodulative ability.

    --J. H. Ross, 1979, A Conspectus of the African Acacia Species, p. 46

    July 17, 2010

  • The second pathological classification (the loculative or encystic form) of tubercular peritonitis may be suppurative or ascitic.

    --A. W. Cheatham, 1916, Journal of the National Medical Association 8: 18

    July 17, 2010

  • . . . a cortex and medulla were distinguishable, lobulative growth had occurred and small corpuscles had appeared.

    --Eva Sandefeldt, 1973, The Cornell Veterinarian 63: 511

    July 17, 2010

  • How do you solve a problem like Maria? ♫

    July 16, 2010

  • The protein is expressed in bacteria, purified by metal affinity chromatography, and liberated from the His6-SUMO fusion by cleavage with a modified version of the desumoylating enzyme Ulp1.

    --Jane K. Setlow, 2006, Genetic Engineering: Principles and Methods, p. 111

    July 16, 2010

  • The only alphaliteral number in English. German has eins and acht; French has deux, cinq, and dix. What about other languages?

    July 16, 2010

  • The priest's words weighed heavily on Maurice Galvin. His own shortcomings had long haunted him—mostly on windy nights in his lonely cottage, especially, for a season, when he lay abed with his head broken by a mountainey man at Ballyboy fair.

    --Lewis Macnamara, 1898, "The reformation of Maurice Galvin", Pall Mall Magazine 16: 223

    July 16, 2010

  • Interesting distinction you've found hernesheir: "mountainey" means "in the mountains" or "from the mountains", whereas "mountainy" means "full of mountains", "associated with mountains".

    July 16, 2010

  • Hugo is supposed to be a neovulgarist, although I don't know what that means in books. In frocks it means skirts made out of brushed Day-Glo acrylic and anything vinyl.

    --Lee Tulloch, 1989, Fabulous Nobodies, p. 86

    July 16, 2010

  • There was some NH3 — ammonia —

    In Kali, but the real source was here:

    Outgassing from the neovulcanism.

    --Frederick Turner, 1988, Genesis: an Epic Poem

    July 16, 2010

  • For instance, when Leo XIII effected the shift from the Church's profeudalism to its endorsement of middle-class democracy, the protagonists of feudalism inside the Vatican did not suddenly disappear.

    --Wilfried Daim, 1970, The Vatican and Eastern Europe, p. 32

    July 16, 2010

  • An immediate transition from neosultanism to a democratically elected government is almost impossible because of the lack of moderate, somewhat autonomous forces within the regime willing to negotiate such a move and because the country has no independent societal organizations and political institutions and parties, which can emerge only after the fall of the dictator.

    --H. E. Chehabi and Juan José Linz, 1998, Sultanistic Regimes, p. 102

    July 16, 2010

  • Now, by the middle of the twentieth century, it was about to make its dominant residential form a kind of neoruralism that came to be known as suburbanization.

    --Ezra Mendelsohn, 1999, People of the City: Jews and the Urban Challenge, p. 21

    July 16, 2010

  • Los Grupos consisted of more than fifteen groups of diverse social backgrounds, objectives, and artistic interests that included, among others, performance, photography, neomuralism, books, urban poetry, and urban theater.

    --Luis Camnitzer et al., 1999, Global conceptualism: points of origin, 1950s-1980s, p. 59

    July 16, 2010

  • They thought they'd be discussing funding for breast cancer research, but he wanted to talk about the neolunatic myth that there's a link between abortion and breast cancer.

    --Shelley Lewis, 2006, Naked Republicans: a Full-frontal Exposure of Right-wing Hypocrisy and Greed, p. 18

    July 16, 2010

  • Yes, the hyphenated forms usually appears first, but I don't list them, unless they're forms unlikely to lose the hyphen (e.g., soul-searchingly), in which case they go on Panvocalic phrases, or are proper names (e.g., Duplessis-Mornay, Port-au-Prince). Of course, that gives you and ruzuzu more room to romp . . .

    July 15, 2010

  • Hi hernesheir, I have ultrarevolutionaries unhyphenated. Your discovering it independently is amazing! (I picked it up off a word records website a couple of years ago.)

    July 15, 2010

  • To speak "Anglo-Saxophone" is to talk English in a very loud voice, to a foreigner who does not understand the language.

    --Notes and Queries, p. 80 (1925)

    July 14, 2010

  • Looks like we passed 25,000 lists yesterday or today!

    July 14, 2010

  • I finally caught up with all your panvocalic plants (and other ponderable creatures), hernesheir. Thanks for helping to pushed my Panvocalic organisms list over 500 items!

    In the process, I saw some tags that you'll probably want to revisit. I've noted them temporarily in the list description.

    July 14, 2010

  • Hi ruzuzu, I tag only the vowel sequences; hernesheir also tags words as euvocalic, euryvocalic, and panvocalic. Do either or both, as you prefer. Include all the vowels when you tag, e.g., aeioue for "abstemiousness". I don't generally list panvocalics with extra vowels, so there is ample room for another list too. My Panvocalic polyglot list is open if you want to add to that.

    July 13, 2010

  • However, the principal of grafting a patient's own vein remained largely ignored well into the 1960s. Although surgeons at Walter Reed Army Hospital successfully used autovein grafting in the early 1950s, most surgeons opted instead for arterial grafts.

    --Kathryn Hahner, 1993, Perspectives on Medical Research, p. 65

    July 12, 2010

  • He said "Scat!" to civilization and literally wandered autowise and otherwise into the northern wilderness with a writing pad, camera, sketchbook, rods, duffle bags and a khaki pillow case which he had the nerve to call a tent.

    --Charles Bradford, 1921, The American Angler, p. 403

    July 12, 2010

  • Most standard modules in kits performed an autowipe if the remote experienced a privacy shutdown.

    --Laura E. Reeve, 2008, Peacekeeper, p. 86

    July 12, 2010

  • What would members of a congregation think of a minister who failed to appear in the pulpit on Sunday without notifying his members because he had an opportunity to golf, fish, autoride, sleep, rest, or engage in some other personal pleasure?

    --The Lutheran Witness 46: 454 (1927)

    July 12, 2010

  • The DREADCO autopipe will store up its smoke as a long-lasting foam, to be inhaled at pleasure. The user would breathe out in big bubbles and these could be caught in a "bubble tray", preventing suffering for non-smokers nearby.

    --Daedalus, 1983, New Scientist 97(1344): 420

    July 12, 2010

  • I have reason to believe that the boy is operating a borrowed, manually controlled vehicle on the Canada autopike, northbound from Philadelphia, ETD forty minutes ago.

    --Keith Laumer, 1976, The Best of Keith Laumer, p. 112

    July 12, 2010

  • The quantity of JJ-180, for security purposes, was shipped to Lilistar in five separate containers on five separate transports. Four reached Lilistar. One did not; the reegs destroyed it with an automine.

    --Philip K. Dick, 1966, Now Wait for Last Year

    July 12, 2010

  • Automobile dealers often congregate in a single location (the "automile"). Furniture stores also cluster together. If there are three stores of a competing nature in a town, two in one location and one some distance away, the two may have an advantage.

    --David E. Bell and Walter J. Salmon, 1996, Introduction to Retailing: Text and Cases, p. 180

    July 12, 2010

  • The autoline system has up to 40000 to 50000 hooks on a longline up to 60 km in length.

    --Jeanne Mager Stellman, 1998, Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety, vol. 3, p. 66.7

    July 12, 2010

  • But SUVs, which are essentially trucks with autolike bodies, have a high risk of a rollover due to their high center of gravity and can pose dangers to passengers and occupants.

    --Ballard C. Campbell, 2008, American Disasters: 201 Calamities That Shook the Nation, p. 181

    July 12, 2010

  • But if the Storable type attribute were identified as an "autolife" attribute (an object that could exist without other objects dependencies) it will not be deleted.

    --Li Xu, A. Min Tjoa and Sohail Chaudhryl, 2007, Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems, vol. 2, p. 938

    July 12, 2010

  • . . . and for apneumonic. Go ahead and tag where you want. I re-enter the vowel tags for panvocalics if someone else beats me to them, hoping that someday it will again be possible to link to one's own tags separately from general tags.

    July 12, 2010

  • Sensors on his 'autokite', coupled via its control cables to a computerized manipulator on the ground, enable it to be flown aloft and stabilized at any altitude without human intervention. No matter how the wind fluctuates, the autokite reacts to maintain its height.

    --Nature 348: 116 (1990)

    July 12, 2010

  • Note that competitive fees will be charged for agent out of pocket expenses such as autohire, customs bond, agent overtime, and communications.

    --Fairplay, p. cx (1992)

    July 12, 2010

  • You will recognize some of these submenu items from the earlier chapters on autosketching, and in some cases these operate in a similar manner.

    --Daniel L. Ryan, 1990, Technical Sketching and Computer Illustration, p. 169

    July 12, 2010

  • CJB's activity in the autoblending field will be represented by a typical electronic control panel as a unit in the complete installations available from the Autoblending Section of the Division.

    --Process Control and Automation7: 229 (1960)

    July 12, 2010

  • Remember that Google performs autostemming; a search for “admin login” returns approximately 1.3 million results, including results that were autostemmed to include the phrase "administrator login.

    --Johnny Long and Ed Skoudis, 2005, Google Hacking for Penetration Testers, p. 211

    July 11, 2010

  • Common manipulations include autotruncation, autospelling checkers, thesauri matching, word frequency analysis, and more sophisticated semantic analysis.

    --David Stern, 1999, Digital Libraries: Philosophies, Technical Design Considerations, and Example Scenarios, p. 73

    July 11, 2010

  • As the gangue of the oxide concentrates and ores is mainly siliceous, it is not possible to obtain an autosmelting agglomerate, and it is necessary to add basic fluxes such as iron ore and limestone to the charge.

    --Metallurgical Society Conferences 39: 107 (1959)

    July 11, 2010

  • Manufacturing costs may be further reduced, where the varistors are formed as discs, because varistor discs are substantially cheaper to manufacture than blocks: discs may be formed by 'autopressing' and the firing thereof is quicker since they are much thinner than blocks.

    --John Thatcher, 1996, "Electrical Surge Arrester", U.S. Patent 6,008,977, column 3

    July 11, 2010

  • The water which pours over the top of the mole forms a jet with the possibility of autodredging.

    --Bulletin of the Permanent International Association of Navigation Congresses 38-39: 86 (1964)

    July 11, 2010

  • So even blessing oneself is predicated on conventions of performance which display sensitivity to their interactive origins. It is interesting, however, that there is no conventional speech act for autoblessing in English, such as 'God bless me'.

    --Kurt A. Bruder, 1998, "A pragmatics for human relationship with the divine: An examination of the monastic blessing sequence", Journal of Pragmatics 29(4)

    July 11, 2010

  • Nasal turbinate mucosa and hard palate can be harvested in portions large enough for reconstruction of the upper and lower eyelid simultaneously. This allows for autostenting of the eyelids, upper to lower, during the healing phase.

    --R. A. Goldberg et al., 1999, Archives of Ophthalmology 117: 1255

    July 11, 2010

  • Thanks for autostenting, hernesheir.

    July 11, 2010

  • If John Doe is not within a proximity of the user at the reminder time of 7:00 am on Nov. 1, 2001, then the reminder can be presented to the user graphically, and audibly if so configured in the autoremind parameter.

    --John P. Veschl, 2000, "Intelligent reminders for wireless PDA devices", U.S. Patent 7,212,827 B1

    July 11, 2010

  • The procedure to follow to save the unused film depends on whether your camera features autorewind or is rewound manually; some SLR cameras with a motor drive offer both options.

    --Tom Grimm and Michele Grimm, 2003, The Basic Book of Photography, p. 57

    July 11, 2010

  • The lurid glare of autowelding dazzled the eyes and the snowy veil melted in cones of bluish light.

    --Galina Nikolaeva, 1952, Harvest: a novel, p. 305

    July 11, 2010

  • For example, there may be golden parachute clauses, loan forgiveness, or option autovesting in their employment or option agreements that are triggered by a change in control of the target.

    --Steven M. Bragg, 2009, Controllership: The Work of the Managerial Accountant, p. 730

    July 11, 2010

  • A major inconvenience, if the family wanted to stop by the roadside for lunch when autotenting, was that part of the car would have to be unpacked to get chairs, table, utensils, and food, taking away from the precious time that might be used to increase the day's mileage.

    --Allan D. Wallis, 1997, Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes, p. 36

    July 11, 2010

  • It is known to use card readers in bank autotelling equipment, security, access systems, and in equipment where only authorized users should gain access, for information recorded on a card to be read.

    --James C. R. Massey, 1989, "Card reading apparatus having a passive electric speed controller", U.S. Patent 4,914,279, column 1

    July 11, 2010

  • Every now and then some despairing hotel owner or storekeeper in Europe looks into the future for comfort and winds up his autotelling of fortunes by saying, "When this war is over there will be such a rush to Europe as we've never seen before.

    --William G. Shepherd, 1917, Confessions of a War Correspondent, p. 138

    July 11, 2010

  • Darman changed the autopenning system so that more official papers were signed by the autograph machines—and so were letters to friends.

    --Richard Reeves, 2005, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination, p. 59

    July 11, 2010

  • You'll learn how to configure your machine to participate in a network, see how to configure the client side of some important network services, and look at what IP autonetting is and how it can affect your computers.

    --Eric Johnson and Eric Beehler, 2007, MCITP: Microsoft Windows Vista Desktop Support Enterprise Study Guide, p. 263

    July 11, 2010

  • Scan data is reduced to geometric primitives for use by Grumman's IBM CADAM "autonesting" program that feeds numerical control output generation of aircraft parts.

    --Hardcopy7: 90 (1987)

    July 11, 2010

  • This extra iteration loop, combined with the automeshing algorithm, can be quite time consuming when buried inside a shape optimation loop.

    --Anees Ahmad, 1997, Handbook of Optomechanical Engineering, p. 322

    July 11, 2010

  • The more expensive word processors offer such features as automerging, which permits you to insert names and addresses in separate form letters and then print them without having to edit and print each one manually.

    --Olen R. Pearson, 1996, Consumer Reports Guide to Personal Computers, p. 38

    July 11, 2010

  • If a dealer was unable to deliver a bond, it either failed on the trade (incurring a fail cost that might be 400-600 basis points) or it attempted to borrow the bond in question via the autolending programs operated by the global clearers — at a cost of up to 350 basis points.

    --Frank J. Fabozzi, 1997, Securities Lending and Repurchase Agreements, p. 30

    July 11, 2010

  • The conditions of the instrument: plasma power 1050 kW, radio frequency 40 MHz, argon gas for plasma, auxiliary and nebulizer of 15.0, 0.5 and 1.0 l min-1, respectively, autolensing of ion lens and sample aspiration rate of 1.0 ml min-1 were employed.

    --Jaroon Jakmunee et al., 2001, Analytical Sciences 17, Supplement, p. i1416

    July 11, 2010

  • Some patients with horseshoe kidney may suffer episodes of abdominal pain and vasomotor disturbances that can be relieved by autoflexing the trunk.

    --Ayten Someren, 1989, Urologic Pathology with Clinical and Radiologic Correlations, p. 31

    July 11, 2010

  • Fractions were collected either from the top of the gradient by a Buchler autodensity flow analyzer or by puncturing the tube at the bottom and sampled for radioactivity and infectivity.

    --R. Mittelstaedt1, H. Oppermann and G. Koch, 1975, Archives of Virology 47: 383

    July 11, 2010

  • Why is the autotwisting (or autobending) phenomenon absent, or at least negligibly small, in Zr-2.5Nb-H alloys?

    --Iain G. Ritchie and Zheng-Liang Pan, 1992 in, Vikram K. Kinra, Alan Wolfenden (eds.), M3D: Mechanics and Mechanisms of Material Damping, p. 393

    July 11, 2010

  • One can go further and consider the case of true autoantibodies; that is to say, antibodies that react with substances originating in the same organism that elaborated them. We were able to induce such antibodies by injecting guinea pigs with autotestis, isotestis, or heterotestis.

    --G. A. Voisin, F. Toullet and P. Maurer, 1958, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 73: 729

    July 11, 2010

  • In 1910 Schwarz hypothesized that peptic ulcer is a product of self digestion, which results from a 'disproportion in the normal balance between the autopeptic power of gastric juice and the protective forces of the gastric mucous membrane'.

    --T. C. Northfield, Michael Mendall, Patrick M. Goggin, 1993, Helicobacter pylori Infection: Pathophysiology, Epidemiology, and Management, p. 62

    July 11, 2010

  • Polysaccharides can be roughly separated into two groups, homopolysaccharides and heteropolysaccharides. Homopolysaccharides are autopectin, glycogen (reserve tissue

    in animal bodies), insulin, and cellulose.

    --Lada Manolova, 2003, Natural Pharmacy, p. 3

    July 11, 2010

  • Sept. 1, 1913 . . . 480 tubes autopencil leads . . . $22.40

    --Statement of Contingent Expenses, Treasury Department, 63rd Congress, 3rd Session, House of Representatives, Document no. 1241, p. 8

    July 11, 2010

  • Antibodies could mimic endogenous ligands, such as the endogenous autolectin described by Kuchler et al. or block interaction of oligodendroglia with other cells . . . .

    --I. D. Duncan, Robert P. Skoff and David Colman - 1990, Myelination and Dysmyelination, p. 91

    July 11, 2010

  • The fever resulting from the absorption of foul stuff from the parturient canal, either from unbroken mucous surface, or by the open mouths of vessels, or from traumatic surfaces, this is autoseptic. This form also is likely to complicate other fevers.

    --Robert Barnes and Fancourt Barnes, 1885, A System of Obstetric Medicine and Surgery, p. 727

    July 11, 2010

  • In the Byzantine terminology again, a uniquely-profiled idiomelon becomes a prototype or generator automelon, the basis for imitated melodies or prosomoia. Automelic chants are generally cut of the same stylized cloth as the idiomelic chants that make up the bulk of their particular category. But the automela were so well-fixed in choristers' and congregational memories that in early hymn-books they rarely appeared with neumes.

    --Kenneth Levy, 1990, "On Gregorian Orality", Journal of the American Musicological Society 43: 218

    July 11, 2010

  • He knew she had summoned an automedic and that the diligent robot doctor worked on him for more than ten minutes.

    --Robert E. Vardeman, 1987, Plague in Paradise, p. 129

    July 11, 2010

  • I happened to have an old list of reduplicatives in a file drawer, so I was happy to extract the hyphenated ones.

    How are you searching for palindromic convowel patterns? Are there particular ones you're still looking for. One of the things I like about convowel tagging is the serendipity of the words that group together.

    July 10, 2010

  • With only very few exceptions, the large majority of so-called nanocomposites developed to date are micro-nanocomposites, rather than nano-nano composites (where both the matrix and inclusion grain size are in the nanometer range).

    --Michael J. Zehetbauer and Yuntian Theodore Zhu, 2009, Bulk Nanostructured Materials, p. 553

    July 10, 2010

  • Thanks, frogapplause! (Have you been talking to my wife?)

    July 9, 2010

  • Hi, oroboros, yes, I meant "demo" (demolish) as "tear down" versus "demo" (demonstrate, promote) as "build up". The fanfeel is mutual. I've mined quite a few of your lists.

    July 9, 2010

  • How about demo?

    July 9, 2010

  • mayim

    July 8, 2010

  • Psst, isobaric.

    July 8, 2010

  • Do any of these qualify?

    July 8, 2010

  • Finnish for Canada goose.

    July 8, 2010

  • The robot made a moue. Back then it had seemed to Justinian as if it wore its skin inside out Later he would realize that it was an underderm; the robot had yet to pull on its proper skin.

    --Tony Ballantyne, 2006, Capacity, p. 159

    July 8, 2010

  • Odd as it looks, ccvvvv for "clayey" seems right. I hadn't heard of "gleyey" but it looks like standard usage in books on soil.

    July 8, 2010

  • Nope, unable to tag beforehand with "cvcvcvcvcc", although I could tag it with "hand. That's a strange bug.

    July 4, 2010

  • Yes, use the convowel tag if you're so inclined. We're at 1398 distinct patterns at the moment.

    July 4, 2010

  • I tagged the louse with the pattern I was expecting; hope that makes it clearer.

    I haven't been doing much convowel tagging lately. At the moment, I'm tagging your newly found convowel patterns with "convowel". (It's easy to recognize them, as they're blue in my view of your tag list.)

    July 4, 2010

  • Yo (Philadelphese for hello), hernesheir, thanks for retagging, but I was hoping you'd remove the half tags, to clean up the tag lists for aeoiu and yioeau.

    I see you've been bitten by the convowel bug and that I have to catch up on my tagging.

    July 4, 2010

  • Unfortunately, the name is preoccupied; Leviathan was used as a genus name by Koch in 1841, for what what proved to be a fossil mastodon.

    July 4, 2010

  • Ussolzewiechinogammarus and Haemodipsus lyriocephalus are great examples of reduplicatory multivocalness, hernesheir! I knew about Dybowski's predilection for long Gammarus names, but hadn't thought to search them for doubly panvocalic words. By the way, could you tag the full complement of vowels in the louse, rather than the half set?

    July 4, 2010

  • If I were listing collateral adjectives I'd either use Wordnik's related word function, or put them into a list serially, e.g., Odd Anagrams. Or you could substitute a hyphen for the slash.

    June 26, 2010

  • It's not really any harder than finding Panvocalic Pants. Just think of a likely genus, see what species ITIS lists in it, then select the ones with complementary vowels.

    June 26, 2010

  • Wordnik doesn't like the slashes.

    June 25, 2010

  • So what were you using if not IPNI? Are you scanning visually, or querying a database?

    June 24, 2010

  • A euvocalic synonymous with a monovocalic.

    June 24, 2010

  • Hey, reesetee, we're still waiting for that panvocalic bird list (see The Sound of One Hand Typing). I have some more for you: Otus alfredi, Vireo nanus, Corvus capensis.

    June 23, 2010

  • But then you are consoled: you get to reload it, laying bare the stapler arm and dropping a long zithering row of staples into place; and later, on the phone, you get to toy with the piece of the staples you couldn't fit into the stapler, breaking it into smaller segments, making them dangle on a hinge of glue.

    --Nicholson Baker, 1988, The Mezzanine, p. 14

    June 23, 2010

  • . . . attempting to staple a thick memo, and looking forward, as you begin to lean on the brontosaural head of the stapler arm, to the three phases of the act . . . .

    --Nicholson Baker, 1988, The Mezzanine, p. 14

    June 23, 2010

  • Then I slipped my shoe back on by flipping it on its side, hooking it with my foot, and shaking it into place. I accomplished all this by foot-feel; and when I crouched forward, over the papers on my desk, to reach the untied shoelace, I experienced a faint surge of pride in being able to tie a shoe without looking at it.

    --Nicholson Baker, 1988, The Mezzanine, p. 13

    June 23, 2010

  • Then it had not been tagged as knowledge to be held for later retrieval, and I would have forgotten it completely had it not been for the sight of the CVS bag, similar enough to the milk-carton bag to trigger vibratiuncles of comparison.

    --Nicholson Baker, 1988, The Mezzanine, p. 8

    June 23, 2010

  • Some of these aren't phrasal verbs, folks. But you're welcome to add them to Get, Got, Gotten.

    June 23, 2010

  • See comments at wasteliquor.

    June 23, 2010

  • The spelling "wasteliquor" does occur on p. 727, but "waste liquor" appears on p. 745, so it seems not to be an intentional spelling.

    June 23, 2010

  • Thanks for the additions to the euryvocalic pattern list, hernesheir! Dicerocaryum was a new pattern as well. You've inspired me to resume the search for panvocalic animals. I've mined a lot them from ITIS. Are you working from IPNI? (BTW, check your tags on Hedraiostylus.)

    June 23, 2010

  • Apparently coined by J. E. Schmidt in Reversicon:

    a Medical Word Finder

    (1958: 93).

    June 22, 2010

  • There is only one species known in Hawaii, and it is the only eyeless hypogastrurine there.

    --K. A. Christiansen and P. Bellinger, 1992, Insects of Hawaii p. 28

    June 21, 2010

  • Apterourids share a broad collum and paranota with rhiscosomidids and buotids, but their male ninth legs are reduced to single segments fused to the sternites and are entirely hidden under the gonopods.

    --William A. Shear, 2009, Zootaxa 2290: 43

    June 21, 2010

  • Hoff (1946) upon re-examination of Banks' type specimens of P. bicornis (the generotype of Pseudogarypus) confirmed the presence of "pseudospines" on the first coxae just as Jacot had implied and gave support to the idea that there were two North American genera of pseudogarypid pseudoscorpions: Pseudogarypus and

    Cerogarypus.

    --Ellen M. Benedict and David R. Malcolm, 1978, Journal of Arachnology 6: 82

    June 21, 2010

  • Megaluropids are sediment-dwelling amphipods that recline in an inverted position, with their legs and antennae projecting from the sediment surface . . . .

    --L. E. Hughes, 2009, Zootaxa 2260: 708

    June 21, 2010

  • Hi, hernesheir. Good call on capitalizing the generic names. I went through my panvocalic lists maybe six months ago and reentered everything that should be capitalized. Unfortunately that ghosted some comments, but it allowed me to add vowel pattern tags for them. I didn’t tag them originally because Wordie didn’t allow capitalization and I didn’t want proper and common mixed together on the tag lists. Since Wordnik allows capitalization, they’re easy to distinguish on the lists.

    Might I suggest that in addition to or instead of commenting on the vowel pattern for genera, you tag them?

    I like the hierarchy. Maybe monovocalic and polyvocalic can be added. Here’s a cocktail napkin version: words (avocalic, vocalic (monovocalic, polyvocalic (panvocalic (supervocalic (euvocalic, euryvocalic ))))) .

    I’m not inclined to take the hierarchy past panvocalic (supervocalic (euvocalic, euryvocalic)). Alphavocalic and retrovocalic don’t have to apply only to panvocalics: for example “unhooked” or “captious” are alphavocalic. We could also distinguish euryvocalics where “y” is a vowel (phosphuranylite) from those where it’s a consonant (youngmanishness), but I don’t think we need mononyms to describe those situations.

    I’ve opened Supervocalic in waiting.

    June 21, 2010

  • Since no other leucopsacid (or rossellid) had a frame of fused hexactins such as that in Euryplegma, Ijima (1903) finally retraced steps and assigned the genus to the dictyonine Dactylocalycidae.

    --John N. A. Hooper and Rob W. M. van Soest, 2002, Systema Porifera: a guide to the classification of sponges, vol. 2, p. 1365

    June 20, 2010

  • At least in some hungarobelbid species, prodorsum with a sclerotized tuberculum . . .

    --Joachim Adis, 2002, Amazonian Arachnida and Myriapoda, p. 100

    June 20, 2010

  • Hernesheir, what do you think of generalizing supervocalic to include both euvocalic and euryvocalic: supervocalics would have each vowel once, with wye optional, euvocalics would exclude wye, and euryvocalics would have to have wye.

    June 20, 2010

  • Here's a euvocalic mineralogical coincidence: chromium garnet = uvarovite.

    June 20, 2010

  • One of my favorite sounds.

    June 20, 2010

  • The fates were quite impartial in their distribution of favors, and the next toucanine thrill came to Howes as he was passing along a trail with mind and eyes concentrated on no higher forms of life than wasps and bees. From almost the first walk I had taken in this part of the jungle I had observed and tried to mark down some of the half dozen big red-billed toucans which fed, and called and climbed hereabouts.

    --William Beebe, G. Inness Hartley and Paul G. Howes, 1917, Tropical Wild Life in British Guiana, vol. 1, p. 192

    June 19, 2010

  • The tetragonurid squaretails are round fishes encircled by ridged scales and with a long caudal peduncle that has a single keel on either side formed from scale ridges.

    --Gene S. Helfman, Bruce B. Collette and Douglas E. Facey, 1997 The Diversity of Fishes, p. 267

    June 19, 2010

  • These differences have been deemed sufficient to recognise the existence of another segnosaurid from the late Cretaceous of Mongolia.

    --David Norman, 1985, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, p. 52

    June 19, 2010

  • Rostratuline birds with long decurved bills, long wings, long legs and feet.

    --Gregory M. Mathews and Tom Iredale, 1921, A Manual of the Birds of Australia, p. 119

    June 19, 2010

  • Titanis, a phorusrhacid? a phorusrhacine?

    --Bulletin of the Florida Museum of Natural History, 2005, p. 207

    June 19, 2010

  • I vote for the expungement of "pungment".

    June 19, 2010

  • Cordulegastrid larvae live in the soft bottoms of streams, buried in mud or sand with only part of their heads and anal appendages raised clear of the substrate.

    --R. R. Askew, 1988, The Dragonflies of Europe, p. 206

    June 19, 2010

  • I also compared the succession of this type in time with the growth of its present representatives in their embryonic condition, and carried out this illustration especially for the Crinoids; showing that in its successive transformations the Comatula passes through stages which, from their resemblance to the full grown Crinoids of earlier ages, I designated as the Cistidian, the Pentremitian, the Platycrinian, the Pentacrinian, and the Comatuline stages of growth.

    --Louis Agassiz, 1869, Annual Report of the Trustees of the Museum of Comparative Zoology for 1868, p. 9

    June 19, 2010

  • The uraeotyphlid family represents a transition between basal and more developed forms of caecilians.

    --Rebecca Stefoff, 2007, The Amphibian Class, p. 72

    June 19, 2010

  • Two new protamines: katsuwonine and plecoglossine.

    --Kyushu Journal of Medical Science, 1: 33 (1950)

    June 19, 2010

  • The Caulophrynines present a combination of remarkable characters. The antepectoral region or "head" is remarkably large—even larger than the rest of the body, the mouth very deeply cleft and little oblique, and the pectoral fins are large; the dorsal and anal are not only multiradiate, but most of the rays greatly prolonged.

    --Theodore Gill, 1909, "Angler fishes: their kinds and ways", Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1908, p. 585

    June 19, 2010

  • The caluromyine woolly opossums are specialised fruit and nectar eaters, hanging by their prehensile tails in the branches of the high forest canopy.

    --T. S. Kemp, 2005, The Origin and Evolution of Mammals, p. 192

    June 19, 2010

  • Ambulocetids are only known from Indo-Pakistan and are always found in littoral sediments . . . .

    --J. G. M. Thewissen, 1998, The Emergence of Whales: Evolutionary Patterns in the Origin of Cetacea, p. 458

    June 19, 2010

  • Of course the battleground motif with its notes of air raids and unruly squadrons is a neomusical conceit anticipating the last quartet, Little Gidding, in which the wartime theme is more fully developed in allusions to the London bombings . . . .

    --Martin Schiralli, 1999, Constructive Postmodernism: Toward Renewal in Cultural and Literary Studies, p. 120

    June 17, 2010

  • His first volume, The Laurel: An Ode (1889), betrayed the overmusical influence of Lanier and gave promise of that extraordinary facility which often brought Hovey perilously close to the pit of mere technique.

    --Louis Untermeyer, 1921, Modern American Poetry, p. 91

    June 17, 2010

  • See the tag long.

    June 17, 2010

  • In the GUIDE trial, acute lumen gain by PTCA was measured by computing the ratio of the post-procedure neoluminal area to the nominal balloon cross-sectional area (neolumen:balloon ratio, NLBR).

    --Christopher J. White, 1995, Interventional Cardiology, p. 10

    June 17, 2010

  • Psst, factitiousness.

    June 17, 2010

  • I think that's a job for John (page 5).

    Pro, have you coalesced?

    June 16, 2010

  • Synonym of metacinnabar.

    June 16, 2010

  • Referring to your comment on my profile, brumadoite (valid) and saukovite added. What to do about burovaite, which seems to have appeared only as "burovaite-Ca"? I guess that means they expect another variety to be discovered with a different element in the Ca slot.

    June 16, 2010

  • How are you handling synonyms, hernesheir? I checked on a list of approved mineral names and found sulphohalite, but not sulfohalite, so the latter is an unofficial synonym. The list also has saukovite as a synonym of metacinnabar, so I guess that's an official synonym. Does either synonym qualify for your list?

    Edit: just saw that you addressed sulfohalite already on my profile.

    June 16, 2010

  • Glad to help. Let me know if you find anything that needs editing in my lists.

    Have you thought about tackling names of pharmaceuticals? I'll bet there are more panvocalics lurking there.

    June 16, 2010

  • Fabulous list, hernesheir! I'm happy to have inspired such an excellent obsession. I've added a bunch to my panvocalic and euryvocalic lists, putting the former over 2500 words. And tellurantimony makes the 240th euryvocalic vowel pattern, so one third of all possible ones have now been found!

    Hard as may be to believe, none of my panvocalic listings are coinages: they all appear in print somewhere. Note that dusmantovite and suaconite are misspellings, and check your tags for plumbonacrite. Is sulphohalite an official name? If so, I'll change my listing from sulfohalite.

    June 16, 2010

  • Thanks, hernesheir! Any list containing wentletrap deserves support.

    June 15, 2010

  • Not to be confused with pulicarious, of the nature of or resembling a flea.

    June 15, 2010

  • Go for the plural!

    June 14, 2010

  • "Through difficulties to the stars" is usually "per aspera ad astra". The Wizard of Oz said "per ardua ad alta", which is "through difficulties to the heights".

    June 12, 2010

  • Thanks bajacalla, but I'm not including purely reduplicative words (see the list description).

    June 12, 2010

  • Is this word right here?

    June 12, 2010

  • When volition precedes perception of potential, woulda, coulda, shoulda expresses regret for inaction (and volition was mere velleity), whereas coulda, woulda, shoulda suggests that obligation was not perceived until opportunity had passed.

    June 12, 2010

  • Erin, do gimme and lemme qualify?

    June 11, 2010

  • But doesn't the possibility of doing something usually exist before one becomes aware of it?

    June 11, 2010

  • More shelter here.

    June 10, 2010

  • So which is it, woulda, coulda, shoulda or coulda, woulda, shoulda?

    June 10, 2010

  • I submitted my first grant proposal yesterday that mentions those methods.

    (Five days till Prolagus coalesces . . .)

    June 9, 2010

  • Yes, ultrarevolutionaries and automobile insurance. They live on Panvocalic Miscellany.

    June 9, 2010

  • Pro? Now that you've nailed concatenation . . .

    June 5, 2010

  • Different listing styles I guess. I generally go for the shortest entry I can. Love your edgy sedge list by the way.

    June 5, 2010

  • Pounce!

    June 5, 2010

  • Hi ruzuzu, I meant man-o'-war to encompass all three (ship, bird and jellyfish).

    June 5, 2010

  • and cannelloni.

    May 30, 2010

  • The very lovely aboriginal abalone.

    May 30, 2010

  • Speak clearly or you'll be deported.

    May 26, 2010

  • Thanks hernesheir! I just wish there were more of them. I don't often find new ones these days.

    May 24, 2010

  • Yes, I got a copy for Chanukkah last year. It's intense.

    May 20, 2010

  • Doesn't cacholong refer primarily to the mineral rather than the color?

    May 18, 2010

  • You're not the first to coin it. It apparently means "containing mercury":

    "...the outer container, also of steel, is sprayed with a special pigmented mercatious iron ore, which, with the galvanizing renders the container unlikely to rust."

    --Journal of the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene 3: 140 (1940)

    May 17, 2010

  • Sorry Pro, guess I'm not photo-literate. It never crossed my mind to photograph the tag, and alas, it is no more. Maybe I can find one on the way out tomorrow.

    May 10, 2010

  • I flew into Tagbilaran airport (Bohol, Philippines) a few days ago, and was delighted to find a TAG tag on my suitcase.

    May 7, 2010

  • *graohns*

    April 21, 2010

  • How about maedi, a viral disease of sheep.

    April 17, 2010

  • A preempt? By analogy to the term used by bridge players.

    April 16, 2010

  • People haven't the data for being wisely in love till they've reached the age when they haven't the least wish to be so.

    --William Dean Howells, 1887, April Hopes

    April 16, 2010

  • . . . it was not that she thought what Dan had just said was so very funny, but people are immoderately applausive of amateur dramatics, and she was feeling very fond of the young fellow.

    --William Dean Howells, 1887, April Hopes

    April 15, 2010

  • Thanks again. The reverse dictionary function of OneLook helped quite a bit in compiling it.

    OED has a cloth definition of flax, so it's in.

    April 12, 2010

  • Thanks, agatehinge. I've added tergal and casement. Antique satin doesn't fit my list because it's two words.

    Good to have a fabric expert around. Anything to add about etamine/etamins/estamins from the previous comments?

    April 12, 2010

  • Junk food deity?

    April 12, 2010

  • Would that That buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo?

    Would that that That buffalo would.

    April 10, 2010

  • Seeing that no one has picked up the thread, I'll continue.

    Another student in her essay said that that That that that student was from is in the North West Frontier Province, not in Sindh.

    Is it true that that "that that That that that" that that student used in her essay was also correct?

    April 9, 2010

  • Or forked?

    April 8, 2010

  • Amœbæ yes, amoebae no.

    April 8, 2010

  • I heard that that student was from That, Pakistan.

    April 8, 2010

  • Es prohibido.

    April 7, 2010

  • The champion is honorificabilitudinitatibus; unimaginatively, verisimilitudes, parasitological, cytomegalovirus, and aluminosilicates are also longer.

    April 6, 2010

  • Your pro- words should still be there. Try refreshing your screen (F5) when it seems like things have disappeared.

    April 5, 2010

  • lol as a pictograph.

    March 31, 2010

  • Alos slanticular.

    March 31, 2010

  • The woven pads are called potholders.

    March 31, 2010

  • ...and not heard.

    March 29, 2010

  • Leaving only artichoke remains.

    March 29, 2010

  • There's some imagined eternal perfection represented there, something lasting. Your books are . . . unmottled. Is that a word?

    --Roland Merullo, 2007, Breakfast with Buddha, p. 16

    March 24, 2010

  • I remember that two of the shocks I'd experienced in coming to New York were discovering that Ringling was considered an unusual last name and that most people had never heard of knoephla soup.

    --Roland Merullo, 2007, Breakfast with Buddha, p.290

    March 24, 2010

  • And them, to finish, an apricot- and walnut-stuffed palascinta, which turned out to be a thin pancake stuffed with apricot-walnut cream.

    --Roland Merullo, 2007, Breakfast with Buddha, p. 144

    March 24, 2010

  • Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man's gentleness, his thereness. The girl knew from the outset that Hans Hubermann would always appear midscream, and he would not leave.

    --Markus Zusak, 2005, The Book Thief, p. 37

    March 24, 2010

  • He was always just there. Not noticeable. Not important or particularly valuable. The frustration of that appearance, as you can imagine, was it's complete misleadance, let's say. There most definitely was value in him, and it did not go unnoticed by Liesel Meminger.

    --Markus Zusak, 2005, The Book Thief, p. 34

    March 24, 2010

  • Thanks, gangerh! Quaintly led me to Queensland.

    March 24, 2010

  • It has a wonderful power to check the process of disintegration and correct its inevitable saniousness.

    --J. C. Sanders, 1880, Transactions of the American Institute of Homoeopathy 32‎: 297.

    March 23, 2010

  • ... whereupon said Devil is soundly defeated by the virtuoso fiddle-playing skills of a vernacular violinist infused with the ambient radiousness of Biscuitism.

    --Pope Gus Rasputin Nishnabotna Sni-A-Bar, 2009, The Nuclear Platypus Biscuit Bible, p. 137

    March 23, 2010

  • . . . volmerine cacumination and mitotic ramuliferousness leading to operculate onagerosity and testaceous favillousness . . .

    --Nicolas Slonimsky, Richard Kostelanetz, and Joseph Darby, 1994, Nicolas Slonimsky: the first hundred years, p. 372

    March 23, 2010

  • Aaargh.

    March 23, 2010

  • Contains three vowels followed by three consonants. Are there any other such words?

    March 23, 2010

  • I've just noticed the alphabet links in the footer, apparently a new feature. The lists by letter aren't sorting as advertised, "Ordered by the number of occurrences in our database of example sentences". For example, under x, "xiphophyllous" near the top of the list has no examples, but "xylophone" near the bottom has several.

    March 23, 2010

  • Charlie the Tuna.

    March 22, 2010

  • "Seraglio" in English.

    March 22, 2010

  • OSPD4 lists it as meaning "quiet", of which OED2 lists it as being 18th century variant.

    "And maybe aifter the sairman, Hugh and yourself—though it wunna be easy for him wi' the lame leg—may hev a reel with the dancing scholars." "Be quate, be quate," exclaimed Angus Matheson, an old, sombre, sour-looking native, of some sixty years of age; " don't be putting sairmans and dancing together that way."

    --Colin Macdonald, 1881, Chronicles of Stratheden, p. 166

    March 21, 2010

  • Digging a bit more, I found that "pi" is an American spelling of "pie", and that OSPD4 doesn't list "pyeing", so the SOWPODS entry must be British. OED2 says, "To make (type) into 'pie'; to mix or jumble up indiscriminately". It also says, "To put (potatoes, etc.) in a pit or heap and cover them with straw and earth, for storing and protection from frost", which also has a sense of jumbling. Here's an example for the latter:

    "The Swedes are pulled, topped, tailed and put into heaps (about eight heaps per acre), which are covered with a small quantity of straw and mould to preserve them from the frost, and to have them ready for use in any weather. This system of pyeing turnips is a very common one in Norfolk, and it is difficult to decide whether the majority of good opinions is in favour of it, or rather of the other method, which is, "placing" the turnips from several rows side by side, so as to leave at least nine-tenths of the land vacant."

    --John Hudson, 1847, The Farmer's Magazine 16: 5

    March 21, 2010

  • It could be a variant of piing, as in "piing the type", more common as "pied the type", from the verb pi. I don't know if this is what SOWPODS means. Here's an example:

    "This word pyeing, as made use of in an old Rule of Court, signifies the selecting the Declarations from that confused Manner in which they were brought in, and reducing them into an alphabetical Order, for the more ready finding them, &c. It is a Term yet in Use among the Printers, but here it signifies the Reverse of this, for they call pyeing the casting away the Letters out of the Frame, or Box, confusedly together; and this they call making Pye.

    --R. Boote, 1781, An Historical Treatise of an Action or Suit at Law, 2nd edition, p. 69

    March 21, 2010

  • Sandalous!

    March 21, 2010

  • At the place of sectioning the depression is two feet wide by a foot deep and covered with almost a foot of alluvium washed from the slightly higher slopes to the north; within it were collected charcoal, burned pebbles, the very abundant scallop (Pecten irradians), quahog (Venus mercenaria) clam (Mya arenaria), oyster (Ostrca virginiima), also a few specimens of the decker (Crepidula fornicata), jingle shell (Anomia), blood clam (Scapharca pexata) and a fulgur, besides the bones of some fish and birds and broken pottery.

    --Hervey W. Shimer, 1912, "Kitchen Middens as Ethnological Records", Science Conspectus 3: 28

    March 19, 2010

  • A word worth $14 million.

    March 19, 2010

  • Here's another early use as a noun:

    "One from 647 feet is a mash-up of soft, grey, shaly rock enclosing fragments of hard slate or argillite."

    --W. Whitaker and A. J. Jukes-Browne, 1894, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 50: 492

    March 19, 2010

  • Nope. But some of us have sproingy rhinophores.

    March 17, 2010

  • Which of your bird wird lists does entermewer fit?

    March 16, 2010

  • If you're a gull, it might be "ruzuziae".

    March 16, 2010

  • Kinesthetic: Baryshnikov

    March 16, 2010

  • How I wish I could enumerate pi easily, since all these horrible mnemonics prevent recalling any of pi's sequence more simply.

    (Seen here.)

    March 15, 2010

  • If this scenario is extrapolated to a hypothetical megarorqual that is much larger than a blue whale, we find that the whale would not be able to support its metabolism by lunge feeding.

    --Jeremy A. Goldbogen, 2010, "The ultimate mouthful: lunge feeding in rorqual whales", American Scientist 98: 131

    March 15, 2010

  • A chain of face-sharing tetrahedra forms a gently curving triple helix. This pleasing structure was given the name "tetrahelix" by R. Buckminster Fuller.

    --Roald Hoffmann, 2010, American Scientist 98: 116.

    March 15, 2010

  • Jeepers!

    March 6, 2010

  • snail-laden

    March 5, 2010

  • We're up to a thousand different consonant-vowel patterns now, tagged convowel.

    March 5, 2010

  • A step up from incontinent.

    March 5, 2010

  • We'll have to keep this one in reserve in case she runs again.

    March 4, 2010

  • Look under hydroptic; it's defined there.

    March 4, 2010

  • A gargoyle on a keystone?

    March 3, 2010

  • Who am I to judge?

    March 2, 2010

  • mushroom?

    February 28, 2010

  • There are lots of misspelled words in Wordnik. Some are typos by users, others come from errors in the billions of words in the corpus from which Wordnik draws examples.

    You can: a) ignore them, b) tag them as typos or misspellings or c) make clever or snide remarks about them.

    February 28, 2010

  • SPAM-o-rama

    February 28, 2010

  • Psst, VO, check your spelling.

    February 28, 2010

  • Good catch, tusseymountain. I found this explanation:

    "The word 'besague' was rescued by the late Lord Dillon from the compilers of antiquarian glossaries who had confused it with the double-headed axe (bis-aigue or bisacuta)."

    --The Antiquaries Journal 19‎: 427 (1939)

    February 28, 2010

  • And how come when I add it to my Biology list, I'm shown as having listed it, but the list name is not there? Apparently the same bug prolagus reports on sensitivo.

    February 24, 2010

  • Thanks, hernesheir. The family name Psychroteuthidae is tempting too, but it just misses euryvocalic status with that extra "e".

    February 23, 2010

  • *looks for snails under the porch*

    February 23, 2010

  • Standardization of the spelling of flaitchment, recorded in the OED, but not observed in the wild.

    February 20, 2010

  • According to OED2, an error for Dutch cruyshaye, a kind of shark.

    February 20, 2010

  • You should talk to Grant more often Erin!

    February 20, 2010

  • Did John Noyes have a nook in Oneida?

    February 19, 2010

  • Another variant of catawampus, cattywampus . . .

    February 18, 2010

  • Thanks hernesheir. I'm not taking hyphenated words, but kinnikkinnik also occurs, so I'll use that.

    February 18, 2010

  • The algorithm for calculating "Scrabble score" under stats gives incorrect results when a word has more instances of a letter than there are in a Scrabble set. For example, fuzzy has a Scrabble score of 19, not 29, because a blank must be used to play it. And pizzazz can't be played at all, let alone for 45 points.

    February 18, 2010

  • I have lists like that.

    February 18, 2010

  • Littling is an obsolete verb form: little meant "to make small" or "diminish". In the context you cited, "littling" looks more like a misspelling of "vittling", i.e., "victualing" or "supplying".

    February 18, 2010

  • Thanks bilby and hernesheir. This list seemed suspiciously short, so I'm glad to know there's more lurking out there. "Sheesh" is the first 123312 pattern.

    February 17, 2010

  • Here it was perpetual carnival for those who could pay, with something for every taste, including carefully staged mock shanghaiings of selected tourists.

    --Hayford Peirce, 2005, The 13th Death of Yuri Gellaski‎, p. 30

    February 17, 2010

  • ¡Ay! How did I miss that! Thanks, ruzuzu.

    February 17, 2010

  • Have you figured out how many different consonant-vowel patterns are possible? I've found representatives for a couple of dozen more patterns. Your tag for descriptive missed the last vowel (assuming it's yours).

    I've tagged vowel patterns in lots of words over the last couple of years. See the list descriptions for Panvocalics, Panvocalic euryvocalic, Monovocalics, and Double diphthongs etc. Let me know if you find any errors with my tags.

    OneLook might help your search for other patterns, such as words with bh.

    February 16, 2010

  • I changed all the words from Panvocalic Proper (and its derivatives) to upper case so I could see which were capitalized on the tag lists (e.g., aouei).

    February 15, 2010

  • Is it not Italian, or just obsolete? It's listed in this Italian lexicon from 1859.

    February 15, 2010

  • Say, Pro, how did you get a part of speech named for you?

    February 15, 2010

  • Hermaphroditus would be even better.

    February 15, 2010

  • Milea Cyrous would be even better.

    February 14, 2010

  • Hi Bri,

    Love the consonant-vowel tagging! You've covered a lot of ground. I've been adding a few of the odder patterns. There's an extra c in your tag for down.

    February 14, 2010

  • Nattering Nabob Security Service?

    February 14, 2010

  • Navy Navigation Satellite System?

    Natural Necessity Surf Shop?

    February 14, 2010

  • Severer!

    February 14, 2010

  • Apparently it was. Thanks Pro!

    February 14, 2010

  • Regarding the ongoing work on links intended to stop spammers: just when I'd trained my donkey not to eat he died on me.

    Edit: That was posted on the feedback profile.

    February 13, 2010

  • We muster passed on it.

    February 12, 2010

  • Articles that Talese wrote for the Times provided most of the material for his first book, New York: A Serendipiter's Journey (Harper, 1961) . . .

    --Current biography yearbook‎, 1973, p. 424

    February 12, 2010

  • Could I request an Apostrophe Flying Squid Squad instead?

    February 12, 2010

  • It's in his Cardiophonia from 1824 (as "undertempters").

    February 12, 2010

  • PossibleUnderscore, is q.v. what you're looking for?

    Edit: "your" changed to "you're".

    February 12, 2010

  • Assuming none of the pigeons depart before the pigeonholing is finished. Maybe their condo association allows timesharing?

    February 11, 2010

  • An excellent seaslug!

    February 11, 2010

  • Clucklaster either.

    February 10, 2010

  • We wouldn't want you to be lackcluster, marky!

    February 10, 2010

  • Which is it: able to be uncoiled or not able to be coiled?

    February 10, 2010

  • Despite the acute embarrassment of a full-blown riot raging in a so-called "unriotable" penitentiary—and the fact that correctional officers were rarely murdered during an uprising—Warden Barton James and his people relied on the usual reactive models.

    --Peter Collinson, 2002, The Northeast Kingdom‎, p. 76

    February 10, 2010

  • Instead of putting out "All people are of equal worth regardless of merit" as some kind of mysterious truth-claim which appears in fact to be at best groundless and at worst false, would it not have been clearer and less evasive for the human-rights advocate simply to remark that he starts with a commitment on which he will not bend, namely a commitment to the treatment of all people as beings who are to have quite unforfeitably an equality of concern and respect?

    --Kai Nielsen, 1984, Equality and Liberty: A Defense of Radical Egalitarianism, p. 23

    February 10, 2010

  • She had one stack and, in spite of Stevenson's objections, one bow port, or trapdoor, where an unpointable, untrainable, and practically unloadable thirty-two pound gun was located—a "plaything," as her captain later called it.

    --William N. Still, 1988, Iron Afloat: The Story of the Confederate Armorclads‎, p. 47

    February 9, 2010

  • Scharff (1936) eliminated A. maculatus, which had been causing severe malaria, from 185 unoilable irrigation pools scattered over about 2 1\2 square miles . . .

    --Mark Frederick Boyd, 1949, Malariology, p. 1373

    February 9, 2010

  • But he said instead with a gruff uncordialness, "More's the pity," and, crossing his legs, slouched, sullen and black of mood, farther into the comer of his seat.

    --Susan Johnson, 1991, Forbidden‎, p. 94

    February 9, 2010

  • It is very difficult for the literary man to distinguish between a genuine crook term (like "back-door parole," prison slang for dying in prison) and an invented one (like "Chicago overcoat" for coffin).

    --Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler‎, p. 218 (18 May 1950

    February 9, 2010

  • . . . Dante's celestial rose, or Plato's unbodiable good . . .

    --Monica Ferrell, 2008, The Answer is Always Yes‎, p. 74

    February 8, 2010

  • One does not require much imaginative effort to visualize the predicament of an elderly man, originating from the lack of fulfilment in love, though to the sufferer himself, it might seem to be uniquely agonizing and shamefully unconfidable, but still a grand passion.

    --Thought 14‎: 194 (1962)

    February 8, 2010

  • A bounty may go directly to certain interests, but this does not mean that those who engage in bountiable enterprises are made, to this extent, more prosperous than they otherwise would be.

    --Joseph S. Davis, 1939. On Agricultural Policy, 1926-1938‎, p. 106

    February 8, 2010

  • That could be a terrifying suffix, Pro. I'll have to explore it more.

    February 8, 2010

  • Have you discovered any other ideal lists, ruzuzu?

    February 7, 2010

  • Fun list!

    February 7, 2010

  • Looks like it's too late to let you know. ; )

    February 7, 2010

  • Then how did you get to this page? Is seeing it okay?

    February 7, 2010

  • Thanks for the alphaliterals Zeke. I added all but a couple to the list. Hope you'll start a few lists of your own.

    February 6, 2010

  • Letty fretted secretly a good deal about the difference between them and this new-found mother; her own bad grammar, Ben's tobacco, his everlasting noisy hillos and laughs, his bare red legs, gave her many an anxious hour.

    --Rebecca Harding Davis, 1870, "Ben", Putnam's Magazine, new series, 5: 174

    February 6, 2010

  • Bird wird, reesetee!

    February 6, 2010

  • Thanks, Pro! Links fixed.

    February 5, 2010

  • The hotel in D.C. had a lousy bar, the place was gestanko in general.

    --Barbara Kingsolver, 2009, The Lacuna, p. 450

    February 5, 2010

  • Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards.

    --Barbara Kingsolver, 2009, The Lacuna, p. 393

    February 5, 2010

  • The author's "Studs Lonigan" is an Indian youth named Poatlicue, watched by the jealous king as he hones his skill in battle.

    --Barbara Kingsolver, 2009, The Lacuna, p. 345

    February 5, 2010

  • You read more newspapers than Mr. Hearst himself, though it aggravates you to no end. Shiffling through all that claptrap hunting a day's one glory. The rise of the little man somewhere, or the fall of a tryant.

    --Barbara Kingsolver, 2009, The Lacuna, p. 338

    February 5, 2010

  • Think of how you would paint this cat: with her insides exposed, the delicate rib cage curved like a ring's setting around a bloody gem of carnivorous love.

    --Barbara Kingsolver, 2009, The Lacuna, p. 275

    February 5, 2010

  • Just before the border were pecan orchards, dark blocks of trees with their boughs half bright and half shadowed, lit by the electric lights of the shelleries.

    --Barbara Kingsolver, 2009, The Lacuna, p. 84-85

    February 5, 2010

  • Bilby, you beat me to Namarrgon! : )

    February 5, 2010

  • Thanks, john. Another one I just noticed: Apparently when more than one Wordnik contributes a variant, the variants get separate instead of combined headings. See cattywampus for an example. Also, can the drop-down box for related words be set to be blank as a default?

    February 3, 2010

  • Why is that almost every random word I tried tonight (about 40) had 5 examples?

    February 3, 2010

  • Would an aspirator help c_b?

    February 3, 2010

  • The linguists might not agree, but Namarrgon is where the action is online.

    February 2, 2010

  • That makes you about the same vintage as me.

    February 2, 2010

  • Bilby, I think it's misspelled there. Try Namarrgon.

    February 2, 2010

  • Make it five: tonitrophobia.

    February 2, 2010

  • In Hebrew, get means a divorce.

    February 2, 2010

  • John, sorting was changed, but not fixed. Currently it seems to alphabetize words up to the list page that one is on, but not those on following pages. If you click through the pages on a big list, you can see the words accruing into alphabetical order.

    February 2, 2010

  • Oops, I just outed myself as having an alias. I was testing how tags work and started composing the message as mollusque, but it got sent as grasshopper. (BTW, I'm not the only one who used grasshopper, it was traded at least once.)

    February 1, 2010

  • The two-color catalog contains product pictures and specifications for equipment ranging from a greensweeper to turf aerator with core processor.

    --The Golf Superintendent‎, 1975, p. 60

    February 1, 2010

  • got 'em bad

    January 30, 2010

  • Talking crow in The Chronicles of Prydain

    January 30, 2010

  • A giant cat in The Castle of Llyr, the third book of The Chronicles of Prydain.

    January 30, 2010

  • Ack!

    January 30, 2010

  • See meiofauny (Polish).

    January 30, 2010

  • Glad you liked meatloaf.

    January 30, 2010

  • A word game that wasn't listed! (Well, sionnach has dumb crambo). Has anyone played it?

    January 29, 2010

  • How do you feel about discombobulate?

    January 29, 2010

  • It's not usually pejorative, but it can be used pejoratively, just as blonde can (example.)

    January 29, 2010

  • Hmm, if we could just snip out the extra "e": magnotelluric. Which does appear online, but seems to be a misspelling.

    January 29, 2010

  • I agree frindley. I've heard the odor of rotting seashells referred to as a pong, and it's definitely pongsome.

    January 29, 2010

  • It doesn't need a new category, that's what False teeth fairies is for. Maybe gangerh should put a link to it in the list description.

    January 29, 2010

  • The covers were then put through the regular cover-slip preparation, carbofuchsine being used for the bacilli with methylene blue as a contrast stain.

    --C. C. Beach, 1899, "Insects as Etiological Factors in Disease", Proceedings of the Connecticut Medical Society, p. 104

    January 29, 2010

  • Oooh!--with a squid association too!

    January 29, 2010

  • I do' know the times when I 've set out to wash Monday mornin's, an' tied out the line betwixt the old pucker-pear tree and the corner o' the barn, an' thought, 'Here I be with the same kind o' week's work right over again.' I 'd wonder kind o' f'erce if I could n't git out of it noways; an' now here I be out of it, and an uprooteder creatur' never stood on the airth.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1890, Going to Shrewsbury

    January 28, 2010

  • Urge the beast, can't ye, Jeff'son? I ain't used to bein' out in such bleak weather. Seems if I couldn't git my breath. I'm all pinched up and wigglin' with shivers now. 'T ain't no use lettin' the hoss go step-a-tystep, this fashion.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1890, A Winter Courtship

    January 28, 2010

  • And when poor Jerry, for lack of other interest, fancied that his health was giving way mysteriously, and brought home a bottle of strong liquor to be used in case of sickness, and placed it conveniently in the shed, Mrs. Lane locked it up in the small chimney cupboard where she kept her camphor bottle and the opodeldoc and the other family medicines.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1886, Marsh Rosemary

    January 28, 2010

  • To be sure, it was the fashion to appear older in her day,—they could remember the sober effect of really youthful married persons in cap and frisette; but, whether they owed it to the changed times or to their own qualities, they felt no older themselves than ever they had.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1886, The Dulham Ladies

    January 28, 2010

  • I suppose you 're too young to remember John Ashby's grandmother? A good woman she was, and she had a dreadful time with her family. They never could keep the peace, and there was always as many as two of them who did n't speak with each other. It seems to come down from generation to generation like a—curse!" And Miss Debby spoke the last word as if she had meant it partly for her thread, which had again knotted and caught, and she snatched the offered scissors without a word, but said peaceably, after a minute or two, that the thread was n't what it used to be. The next needleful proved more successful, and the listener asked if the Ashbys were getting on comfortably at present.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1884, Miss Debby's Neighbors

    January 28, 2010

  • The wind blew over pleasantly and it was a curiously protected and hidden place, sheltered and quiet, with its one small crop of cider apples dropping ungathered to the ground, and unharvested there, except by hurrying black ants and sticky, witless little snails.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1881, An October Ride

    January 28, 2010

  • They saw the woman that had the guitar, an' there was a company a−listenin', regular highbinders all of 'em; an' there was a long table all spread out with big candlesticks like little trees o' light, and a sight o' glass an' silver ware; an' part o' the men was young officers in uniform . . .

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1900, The Foreigner

    January 28, 2010

  • "Lord, hear the great breakers!" exclaimed Mrs. Todd. "How they pound!—there, there! I always run of an idea that the sea knows anger these nights and gets full o' fight. I can hear the rote o' them old black ledges way down the thoroughfare.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1900, The Foreigner

    January 28, 2010

  • Esther was untouched by the fret and fury of life; she had lived in sunshine and rain among her silly sheep, and been refined instead of coarsened, while her touching patience with a ramping old mother, stung by the sense of defeat and mourning her lost activities, had given back a lovely self-possession, and habit of sweet temper.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1899, A Dunnet Shepherdess

    January 28, 2010

  • I saw two unpromising, quick barbel chase each other upstream from bank to bank, as we solemnly arranged our hooks and sinkers.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1899, A Dunnet Shepherdess

    January 28, 2010

  • The dark pools and the sunny shallows beckon one on; the wedge of sky between the trees on either bank, the speaking, companioning noise of the water, the amazing importance of what one is doing, and the constant sense of life and beauty make a strange transformation of the quick hours.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1899, A Dunnet Shepherdess

    January 28, 2010

  • The truth was that my heart had gone trouting with William, but it would have been too selfish to say a word even to one's self about spoiling his day. If there is one way above another of getting so close to nature that one simply is a piece of nature, following a primeval instinct with perfect self-forgetfulness and forgetting everything except the dreamy consciousness of pleasant freedom, it is to take the course of a shady trout brook.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1899, A Dunnet Shepherdess

    January 28, 2010

  • I watched her for a minute or two; she was the old Miranda, owned by some of the Caplins, and I knew her by an odd shaped patch of newish duck that was set into the peak of her dingy mainsail.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896, The Country of the Pointed Firs

    January 28, 2010

  • I expected she'd come pleasantin' round just to show off an' say afterwards she was acquainted.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896, The Country of the Pointed Firs

    January 28, 2010

  • Yes 'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that 's fit to make an old one out of . . .

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896, The Country of the Pointed Firs

    January 28, 2010

  • Last winter she got the jay-birds to bangeing here, and I believe she'd 'a' scanted herself of her own meals to have plenty to throw out amongst 'em, if I had n't kep' watch.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1886, A White Heron

    January 28, 2010

  • Mrs. Todd had taken the onion out of her basket and laid it down upon the kitchen table. "There's Johnny Bowden come with us, you know," she reminded her mother." He 'll be hungry enough to eat his size."

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896, The Country of the Pointed Firs

    January 28, 2010

  • He might have belonged with a simple which grew in a certain slug-haunted corner of the garden, whose use she could never be betrayed into telling me, though I saw her cutting the tops by moonlight once, as if it were a charm, and not a medicine, like the great fading bloodroot leaves.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896, The Country of the Pointed Firs

    January 28, 2010

  • The conversation became at once professional after the briefest preliminaries, and he would stand twirling a sweet-scented sprig in his fingers, and make suggestive jokes, perhaps about her faith in a too persistent course of thoroughwort elixir, in which my landlady professed such firm belief as sometimes to endanger the life and usefulness of worthy neighbors.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896, The Country of the Pointed Firs

    January 28, 2010

  • You can hardly have the heart to scold any more about the malpractice of patients when we believe in you so humbly and so ignorantly.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1884, A Country Doctor

    January 28, 2010

  • And adverbs tend not to be listed as often as the corresponding adjectives.

    January 28, 2010

  • Citation at seventhly.

    January 28, 2010

  • It was thinly dressed in fluttering paper covers, and was so thick and so lightly bound that it had a tendency to divide its material substance into parts, like the seventhlies and eighthlies of an old-fashioned sermon.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1884, A Country Doctor

    January 28, 2010

  • She was a well made, pretty lookin' girl, but I tell ye 'twas like setting a laylock bush to grow beside an ellum tree, and expecting of 'em to keep together.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1884, A Country Doctor

    January 28, 2010

  • As he looked, he could see through a white low-hung mist, the ridge pole of the cabin roof and the crowstick chimney's ragged edge, the vines growing over the well-house, and bryony taking all the fence corners.

    --Maristan Chapman, 1928, The Happy Mountain‎, p. 150

    January 28, 2010

  • Citation at backlog.

    January 28, 2010

  • Citation at backlog.

    January 28, 2010

  • They brought in the materials for an old-fashioned fire, backlog, forestick, and crowsticks, and presently seated themselves before a crackling blaze.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1884, A Country Doctor

    January 28, 2010

  • I ain't goin' to live in the chimbly-corner of another man's house. I ain't but a little past sixty-seven. I 've got to stand in my lot an' place.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1884, A Country Doctor

    January 28, 2010

  • She might dressmake or do millinery work; she always had a pretty taste, and 't would be better than roving. I 'spose 'twould hurt her pride," --but Mrs. Thacher flushed at this, and Mrs. Martin came to the rescue.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1884, A Country Doctor

    January 28, 2010

  • She was 'shamed to look so shif'less that day, but she had some good clothes in a chist in the bedroom, and a boughten bonnet with a good cypress veil . . .

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877, Deephaven

    January 28, 2010

  • Unintentional, Pro, as was the digital sense of blackberrying, the previous word that I added!

    January 28, 2010

  • And I can tell you another thing that happened among my own folks. There was an own cousin of mine married to a man by the name of John Hathorn.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877, Deephaven

    January 28, 2010

  • We saw them join the straggling train of carriages which had begun to go through the village from all along shore, soon after daylight, and they started on their journey shouting and carousing, with their pockets crammed with early apples and other provisions.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877, Deephaven

    January 28, 2010

  • Tommy Dockum was more interested than any one else, and mentioned the subject so frequently one day when he went blackberrying with us, that we grew enthusiastic, and told each other what fun it would be to go, for everybody would be there, and it would be the greatest loss to us if we were absent. I thought I had lost my childish fondness for circuses, but it came back redoubled . . .

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877, Deephaven

    January 28, 2010

  • To dance by the light of the moon?

    January 28, 2010

  • Kate and I cracked our clams on the gunwale of the boat, and cut them into nice little bits for bait with a piece of the shell, and by the time the captain had thrown out the killick we were ready to begin, and found the fishing much more exciting than it had been at the wharf.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877, Deephaven

    January 28, 2010

  • And then he laughed apologetically, rubbing his hands together, and looking out to sea again as if he wished to appear unconcerned; yet we saw that he wondered if we thought it ridiculous for a man of his age to have treasured up so much trumpery in that cobwebby place

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877, Deephaven

    January 28, 2010

  • He looked more and more like a well-to-do old English sparrow, and chippered faster and faster.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877, Deephaven

    January 28, 2010

  • We found that it was etiquette to call them each captain, but I think some of the Deephaven men took the title by brevet upon arriving at a proper age.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877, Deephaven

    January 28, 2010

  • There was a most heathenish fear of doing certain things on Friday, and there were countless signs in which we still have confidence. When the moon is very bright and other people grow sentimental, we only remember that it is a fine night to catch hake.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877, Deephaven

    January 28, 2010

  • Kate and I took much pleasure in choosing our tea-poys; hers had a mandarin parading on the top, and mine a flight of birds and a pagoda; and we often used them afterward, for Miss Honora asked us to come to tea whenever we liked.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877, Deephaven

    January 28, 2010

  • There was a beautiful view from the doorstep and we stopped a minute there. "Real sightly, ain't it?" said Mrs. Bonny. "But you ought to be here and look across the woods some morning just at sun-up. Why, the sky is all yaller and red, and them low lands topped with fog!

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877, Deephaven

    January 28, 2010

  • We could go together to get her together. (First commented on cleavagram.)

    January 28, 2010

  • The banquet was nearly two hours late in coming forward, and the dryness engendered in the air by forty-three uncocktailed throats was so powerful that it deranged Mengtsz's electric system and all the lights went out.

    --Stella Benson, 1925, The Little World‎, p. 242

    January 25, 2010

  • Can't stand pat with that one.

    January 25, 2010

  • In Florida you need a permit to fish for permit.

    January 23, 2010

  • I like the Century Dictionary definition--"Same as Cactales: a name introduced without good reason, but now much used."

    January 23, 2010

  • The age is classed, on the presence of tubiflorate composite pollen, as middle Miocene at oldest.

    --James P. Mandaville, 1990, Flora of Eastern Saudi Arabia‎, p. 21

    January 23, 2010

  • This preacher has reduced dubiousness to a fine art. Doubtless he has escaped out of exaggeration, but he has not landed anywhere. Neither has he landed his people anywhere. In the next place he abates his diction to correspond to the neutralism of his thought. It is proper and pale, and inoffensive and unpotential, and void of positive verity.

    --Nathaniel J. Burton, 1888, "Veracity in Ministers", Yale Lectures on Preaching, p. 346

    January 23, 2010

  • 30th edition, edited by Douglas M. Anderson, Patricia D. Novak, Jefferson Keith and Michelle A. Elliott, 2003. A comprehensive work of more than 2000 pages, it has lots of lists in addition to definitions: blocks, bodies, bones, canals, nuclei, syndromes, fossa, fractures, muscles, etc.

    Last word: Zyvox.

    January 21, 2010

  • By J. E. Lighter, 1994-1997. Full title: Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. The first two volumes are excellent, but the work seemed dead in the water when Random House abandoned it. Fortunately, Oxford University Press has decided to continue the work. HDAS also contains dincher (see my comment under Dictionary of American Regional English).

    January 21, 2010

  • It took a long time to walk back, but Mother wasn't angry. She'd found a couple of dinchers in the pocket of her yellow dress.

    --Barbara Kingsolver, 2009, The Lacuna, p. 57

    January 21, 2010

  • Edited by Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall, 1985 (vol. 1) - 2011 (vol. 5). Intensely complete, with many items recorded in no other well-known reference. For example, last night I was reading Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, and came across dincher. It's not in OED2, MW2, MW3, RHD2, CDC1, Urban Dictionary or Wordnik (till now). DARE has it (under dinch): a cigarette butt. See the DARE website for more info.

    Last word: check back in 2011, the work hasn't been completed yet.

    January 21, 2010

  • By Gareth Branwyn, 1997. Subtitle: a pocket dictionary for the jitterati. A short book based mostly items from Wired's "Jargon Watch" feature, many of which probably started as madeupical (geekosphere, goofcore). All entries are capitalized, even though it doesn't capitalize its own title on the cover).

    Last word: Zen Mail.

    January 21, 2010

  • By Don Ethan Miller, 1981. Subtitle: An Essential Guide to the Inside Languages of Today. Grouped by topics, with 24 sections, including medicine, law, ballet, sailing, fashion, drugs, and wine.

    Last word: zygoma.

    January 21, 2010

  • By Anita Pearl, 1980. Full title: The Jonathan David Dictionary of Popular Slang. Most of the terms recorded in this work would already be known to a native speaker, and the organization is strictly alphabetical (no groupings or lists), so it's not clear who the target audience is.

    Last word: zowie.

    January 21, 2010

  • "Valid variation"? Not in Latin or medical English. Words ending in -itis are feminine, so the adjective should be in feminine form. Compare *itis *osa and *itis *osum* on Onelook. Words ending in -derma are neuter, hence the -um ending with "xeroderma pigmentosum".

    January 21, 2010

  • By Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, 1975, Second Supplemented Edition. The appendices contain some massive lists: words sorted by suffix groups (-aroo, -eroo, -roo, -oo), shortenings, reduplications (first, second and third order). These guys would have loved Wordie/Wordnik.

    Last word: Zulu, last word of supplement: zot.

    January 19, 2010

  • By Eric Partridge, 1970. Subtitle: Colloquialisms and Catch-phrases, Solecisms and Catachreses, Nicknames, Vulgarisms and such Americanisms as have been naturalized. 7th edition, two volumes in one (dictionary and supplement).

    Last word: zymy (from zymotic).

    January 19, 2010

  • By J. S. Farmer and W. E. Henley. Subtitle: Three hundred years of colloquial, unorthodox and vulgar English". 1987 reprint of 1890 work titled Slang and its Analogues, 2 volumes. Provides citations illustrating the use of the words, and synonyms in various European languages.

    Last word: Zu-zu.

    January 19, 2010

  • Heads up, ruzuzu!

    January 19, 2010

  • Should be "retinitis pigmentosa". Maybe Gabaldon confused the spelling with "xeroderma pigmentosum"?

    January 19, 2010

  • And now the singular has been found, coined seven years before Borgmann constructed it:

    The name illustrates an important feature of this disease, "subendolymphatic hyperplastic proliferation." . . . It was Dr. Frank's feeling that this was a subendolymphatic proliferation of the endothelium lining these spaces . . . .

    --American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (1957) 73‎: 1070

    January 19, 2010

  • I've been curating my panvocalic lists, mostly to convert listings that need capitalization, and it's given me a new appreciation for the Examples, the images from Flickr and even the Twitter feed. Sometimes they provide the only results for a word: Calepodius, Mahmoudieh, Codiaeum, Bufonidae, Austin Powers.

    Since developing better ways of dealing with capitalization is on the upgrade list, here's a couple more observations.

    On Wordie I didn't tag the items in (for example) Panvocalic Proper with vowel sequences because it would have mixed upper and lower case words together on the tag list without distinguishing them. On Wordnik this isn't a problem since capitalization is preserved, so I can have a mixed list e.g., aeiou. So I hope whatever is being developed to handle capitalization keeps the visual distinction but maps the associated items together. At the moment it seems that the Twitter and images mappings are not case-sensitive, but the definition and example mappings are.

    In most cases, converting to upper case increased the number of words that got a definition feed from the linked dictionaries, however, in some cases with the Century Dictionary, capitalization broke the link.

    I imagine the hardest part with be merging the comments, since comments from capitalized words will intercalate with those from uncapitalized ones, if chronological order is maintained. Maybe in cases where both forms of the word have comments, the ones coming from the capitalized form could have a note to that effect added.

    January 19, 2010

  • Fixed. Thanks, John!

    January 19, 2010

  • I encountered it in the same place; it seems to mean "hysterical". Online it appears in the delightful phrase, "pithiatic rhinolalia".

    January 19, 2010

  • In a cavern, in a canyon,

    Excavating for a mine,

    Dwelt a miner, forty-niner,

    And his daughter Clementine.

    January 18, 2010

  • Caverniloquy, or cavernous pectoriloquy, is the speech of the patient as heard over an ordinary cavity.

    --Richard C. M. Page, 1897, A Handbook of Physical Diagnosis of Diseases of the Organs of Respiration, p. 181

    January 18, 2010

  • Another panvocalic milestone: a word other than an adverb with all six vowels in alphabetical order.

    January 18, 2010

  • The first panvocalic couple: Areithous and Philomedusa (found here).

    January 18, 2010

  • Ahem, our trees ; )

    January 18, 2010

  • I have about 70 dictionaries, mostly English, but also Latin, French, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Tagalog, and Hawaiian. My entomological shelf is maintained by Google Books.

    January 18, 2010

  • One of the most amazing fish is the dipneumonan Lepidosiren, a lunged fish that can survive on dry land.

    --Géraldine Véron, 1998, On the Trail of Big Cats‎, p. 101

    January 18, 2010

  • I'm unable to update the description of my list Panvocalic Euryvocalic. I get the message saying it has been successfully updated, but nothing changes and the edits are not saved.

    January 18, 2010

  • In reviewing the earlier travel books one comes across Eli Bowen, a postal official and writer who emphasized the railroads in a real Hungerfordian manner.

    --Frank P. Donovan, 1940, The Railroad in Literature, p. 105

    January 18, 2010

  • Variant of "Gebroulaz", Italy, in 19th century discussions of the mineral sellaite

    January 16, 2010

  • I think something else is being smoked (H, maybe tagging rather than commenting would suffice?)

    January 15, 2010

  • How about making "random word" show a random listed word? That should get around the problem of it leading mostly to junk.

    January 14, 2010

  • I have a few on Odd Anagrams (vile, evil; parental, paternal; enraged, angered), but it's not restricted to such.

    January 14, 2010

  • Hi PossibleUnderscore, as stated in the list description, all of the listed panvocalics have been used at least once in print, by an author who was not seeking to create a vowel or letter pattern.

    Under Panvocalic euryvocalic, you'll see that I rejected subendolymphatic because it was coined for the pattern rather than the meaning.

    So, yes, I consider all of the items listed to be legitimate words. For obscure words (rare and non-obvious meanings) I generally tag them with a dictionary in which they appear, or provide a quotation.

    "Counterpain" gets more than 600 hits in Google Books. Some of them are misspellings of counterpane, but many are used in the sense of analgesic. Cotigulate I tagged with OED2, since it's listed there (meaning "to tile a house"). Schizoneuran is used in the entomological literature.

    January 13, 2010

  • Thanks all, for the various suggestions. I put one trick pony on Triads 3 and KitKatClub on Triads 2. Nanny, nanny, boo-boo sounds more like a quartet than a triad.

    Ruzuzu, do you mean Music! Music! Music! by Weiss & Baum or Music Music Music by Brewerman?

    January 13, 2010

  • Try procrustean (lower case).

    January 12, 2010

  • My Tagalog dictionary lists pekpek rather than peck.

    January 12, 2010

  • See syllogistic.

    January 9, 2010

  • The related words feature has some interesting behavior, which I discovered when I accidentally listed "foot" as an antonym of autopodium. There was no apparent way to delete the entry, but when I then added "foot" as synonym, it replaced the entry for antonym. More testing shows that a word can be listed as only one of the options (antonym, synonym, cross-reference, related word, rhyme, variant). "Related word" is the most general; if the same word is then listed as a synonym, "synonym" replaces "related word", but more general categories don't supplant more specific ones.

    That's a clever bit of programming, but it prevents some possibilities, such as listing "ramble" as a rhyme and a synonym of "amble", or "sanction" as both synonym and antonym of "encouragement".

    Some other possibilities could be added to the drop-down list: "more general", "more specific", "bigger", "smaller", "more positive", "more negative". This would allow automatic generation and display of word chains such as:

    polygon, quadrilateral, parallelogram, rectangle, square;

    universe, supercluster, galaxy, solar system, star, planet, moon;

    ecstatic, delighted, happy, content, disgruntled, miserable, despondent.

    Might I also suggest that the drop-down list should have a blank rather than "antonym" as a default.

    January 7, 2010

  • Defined as "having the ability to switch between two lexicons in competitive Scrabble" (e.g., OSPD and SOWPODS) in Letterati by Paul McCarthy (2008, p. 287).

    January 6, 2010

  • Aim for "satine" plus the blank in Scrabble for the maximum chance of playing a seven-letter word. See Sera's satine list.

    January 6, 2010

  • I hadn't come across autopod Jubjub, but judging from results in Google books, it's used almost as frequently as autopodium. Pro: does autopod qualify as colloquial? Gangerh: snort!

    January 6, 2010

  • Paws up for autopodium (illustrated here).

    January 5, 2010

  • But there was enough for the shattered man, once a blood, and twice a dandy, but now a querulous, chalkstony valetudinarian — enough for his beautiful, blackbrowed, black-eyed, Frenchified daughter, who came with no good grace from her Boulogne circle of scampish pleasantness to rusticate in au English country-house.

    --Shirley Brooks, 1853, "Aspen Court", Graham's Magazine 43(1): 370

    January 2, 2010

  • "malacozoon . . . a soft animal; a mollusc."

    --George M. Gould & R. J. E. Scott, 1916, The Practioner's Medical Dictionary, 3rd edition, p. 531

    January 2, 2010

  • Then the hill that hid the furnaces was rounded; the flammivorous smelters blooded the silver night for the last time; the moonlight ebbed and flowed upon the lime-cliffs.

    --Randolph Bedford, 1905, The Snare of Strength‎

    January 2, 2010

  • The problem's constructional; the answer's deductional;

    The text is instructional; the States are effluxional.

    --Michael Coper & George Williams, 1997, How Many Cheers for Engineers?‎, p. 153

    January 1, 2010

  • Where do you findum?

    January 1, 2010

  • No such luck, Pro. They're using fat ones.

    January 1, 2010

  • It's listed in MW3, defined as "a German cheese resembling limburger that is produced in a brick shape".

    December 31, 2009

  • Interesting comment among the definitions from American Heritage.

    December 24, 2009

  • Seen here.

    December 24, 2009

  • Is that a non-vocalic, PossibleUnderscore?

    December 24, 2009

  • Thanks ruzuzu! I picked up Brachypolemius and Macroxyletinus for Panvocalic organisms.

    Edit: changed "Proper" to "organisms".

    December 22, 2009

  • We'll have to retool it.

    December 20, 2009

  • Sionnach, your source is inaccurate. The space between the eyebrows is the glabella. The glabella is just below the ophryon (not "ophyron") (and just above the nasion). Diagram here.

    December 20, 2009

  • Spectrum?

    December 20, 2009

  • One day she appeared at the schoolhouse itself, partly out of amused curiosity about my industries; but she explained that there was no tansy in the neighborhood with such snap to it as some that grew about the schoolhouse lot. Being scuffed down all the spring made it grow so much the better, like some folks that had it hard in their youth, and were bound to make the most of themselves before they died.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896, The Country of the Pointed Firs

    December 18, 2009

  • I tell you, Leslie, that for intense, self-centred, smouldering volcanoes of humanity, New England cannot be matched the world over.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1884, A Country Doctor

    December 18, 2009

  • The opposite of a Vexample; the only example (from Sarah Orne Jewett) is the very one I came here to add.

    December 18, 2009

  • There is another story I'd like to have ye hear, if it's so that you ain't beat out hearing me talk. When I get going I slip along as easy as a schooner wing-and-wing afore the wind.

    --Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877, Deephaven

    December 18, 2009

  • Worse still, spirits of the noblest strain, like Edith and Bonduca, suddenly break out into the same fishwifery, and rail with an excess of epithet that is as repulsive as it is picturesque.

    --Gamaliel Bradford, Jr., 1908, "Beaumont and Fletcher", The Atlantic Monthly‎ 101: 131

    December 18, 2009

  • Alone, the suitors, complaining, impress us with Kate's shrewery. She must be so sung up, so made a champion of, for the oncoming battle royal.

    --Theodore R. Weiss, 1974, The breath of clowns and kings: Shakespeare's early comedies and histories‎, p. 56

    December 18, 2009

  • Isn't this just a variant of hoick?

    December 16, 2009

  • It's under blog.

    December 15, 2009

  • SPAM Alert!

    December 15, 2009

  • Crusade, grenade, pavesade.

    December 15, 2009

  • Which came first, dumbassery or asshattery?

    December 14, 2009

  • Terebellum happens to be a genus of mollusk; I hadn't known it was also an asterism.

    December 14, 2009

  • Do you mean terebellum, ruzuzu?

    December 14, 2009

  • A bird and a lizard.

    December 14, 2009

  • Naked mole rats don't get cancer. However, they can die of embarrassment.

    December 13, 2009

  • Big Apple sauce.

    December 13, 2009

  • SPAM alert!

    December 13, 2009

  • Mr. English errs: the word is gantelope.

    December 13, 2009

  • Means mix-mix; also listed as halo-halo. It's a dessert, not drink (unless you let it melt for a while).

    December 13, 2009

  • So the chuckwalla handles unruly lounge lizards!

    December 11, 2009

  • And it's reversible.

    December 11, 2009

  • Hi rover, a couple of us have wandered down this road: see Hogwash! and Humbug and bafflegab. I'll be interested to see where it takes you.

    December 11, 2009

  • Thanks, PU and marky! Marky, do you mean Century Dictionary sense 1 or something rad on Urban Dictionary?

    December 11, 2009

  • Variant of scheltopusik.

    December 10, 2009

  • The American Heritage Dictionary is aiming to displace Weirdnet. Did you know that the chuckwalla is a "large herbaceous lizard"?

    December 10, 2009

  • Hi captaincloud, are you creating a new word, or do you mean neologism?

    December 9, 2009

  • I found a way to salvage chicks, marky.

    December 8, 2009

  • I just noticed in leaving a comment on the blog that absolute rather than relative links must be used there. At least, that's the case in linking to a tag, since the blog has tags of its own. Is it possible to edit comments on the blog?

    December 8, 2009

  • I hadn't anticipated words like "pup", "calf" and "chick" when I started the list. My original thought was words (or phrases in the case of monkey puzzle) that arose independently. "Bug", "primate", etc. don't qualify because they apply to all members of their group and so don't have different origins or meanings.

    "Pup" and "calf" aren't independent words when applied to dog and seal or cow and whale, but the organisms aren't closely related. The young of carnivores might be called "kits" or "cubs" and of ungulates "fawns", "foals", or "shoats". So I'd say they do bring two different kinds of animals to mind.

    "Chick" doesn't fit; there are lots of animals terms that can be applied to people (hog, hawk, rabbit). Doesn't someone have a list like that?

    December 7, 2009

  • Time to turn turtle.

    December 7, 2009

  • Thanks Pro! You can add it to Two for the price of one.

    December 7, 2009

  • How about cockroach?

    December 7, 2009

  • I added roach and realized it refers independently to two different animals (fish and insect). I wonder how many others there are?

    December 7, 2009

  • We reached 100 just in time then!

    December 6, 2009

  • Squirrel could go on both lists!

    December 6, 2009

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