The “Times Topics” blog at the New York Times has posted its second annual analysis of the most frequently looked-up words used in the paper over the last year. You can download a PDF with the entire list of fifty high-falutin’ vocab choices from that article, but BuzzFeed.com was nice enough to post a JPEG of the top 25, which I have for you right here:
The only word on the list that I could not define was “baldenfreude”, but I was relieved to find out from the blog author that it’s not a real word in the first place; it’s a neologism (or, as he calls it, a “nonce word”) made up by Maureen Dowd as a personal dig at NBC President Jeff Zucker (who is bald) about the whole Leno-v-Conan fiasco, borrowing from the German word “schadenfreude”. It’s not a particularly good “nonce word” and is probably best left forgotten from here on out. (Compare that to the tale of the word “malamanteau”, as recently coined by the web comic “xkcd”)
Now, if you want some SERIOUS vocab stumpers, take a look at this list of uncommon English words. Out of the 150 words on that list, I only knew five of them.
And just because I have been sitting on this link waiting for an opportunity to use it, here is a webpage with some particularly obnoxious German compound nouns and the rules for creating them, plus what some English terms might look like if subject to German grammatical constructs. Not too likely to appear in the New York Times, unless Maureen Dowd needs to make another crappy joke.
Boy, that German compound noun page is full of typos. But, otherwise, yeah.