Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, featuring a different top 10 theme each week. This week’s topic is Favorite Words. That felt a little broad to me, so I thought I’d try to come up with a list of words I learned, discovered, or just enjoyed through my reading.
My top 10 are:
- Absquatulation: Departing in a hurry; absconding (encountered in the Outlander series)
- Castrametation: the making or laying out of a military camp (also from the Outlander series)
- Ligneous: made, consisting of, or resembling wood; woody (from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin)
- Ludic: showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness (also from T&T&T)
- Seneshal: the steward or major-domo of a medieval great house (from the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire)
- Symbiont: an organism living in symbiosis with another. (from the Parasitology series by Mira Grant and from Fledgling by Octavia Butler)
- Taradiddle ~ A fib, or falsity (from the Finishing School series by Gail Carriger)
- Widdershins: in a direction contrary to the sun’s course, considered as unlucky; counterclockwise. (from Discworld books by Terry Pratchett)
- Oubliette: a secret dungeon with access only through a trapdoor in its ceiling. (from A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness)
- Barouche-landau: A barouche-landau was an expensive four-wheeled carriage drawn by two horses, with two collapsible hoods – one for the front-facing passengers and one for the rear-facing passengers. (from Emma by Jane Austen)
Do you have any favorite words that you’ve picked up from your reading?
If you wrote a TTT post, please share your link!
Bookshelf Fantasies 
Symbiont is such a great word.
My post: https://lydiaschoch.com/top-ten-tuesday-favorite-words/
It’s a cool one, isn’t it? Sounds creepy and science-y all at the same time. 🙂
A great list. I like that you have included where you encountered the word too!
Have a great week!
Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog
My post:
Thanks! I tend to highlight unusual words when I use my Kindle — it’s always fun to go back and take a look.
Kindles are good for that. I like to look up words that I haven’t heard before and Kindle is just so handy for that!
I love that you related the words back to the book or series you read them in.
Thanks! It was a very fun prompt this week.
Taradiddle is so fun. I need to start using it in my vocabulary. Great list!
I picked up a bunch of fun words and expression from Gail Carriger books 🙂
1 & 2–and I made it through Outlander but missed those! Good work!
Thanks! I think both of those may have actually been chapter titles, somewhere around books 5 or 6 🙂
Those are some fabulous words! The only ones I knew were oubliette, widdershins, and symbiont. 🙂 And I love taradiddle!
Oubliette gives me the creeps… probably because I associate it so strongly with a particularly unpleasant scene in A Discovery of Witches.
I love these! I ran across oubliette way back in Interview With the Vampire and it’s haunted me ever since😬
Ooooh, is it in Interview? Then that’s where I first came across it — great word, especially for books with vampires. 🙂
I love learning new words when I read. This is such a fun list! 😀 The most memorable word I learned from reading is chaos. I had never seen it written before and it confused me to no end until I realize what it was. LOL.
My TTT
Haha, it makes sense that chaos would be confusing! There are plenty of words that look nothing like they sound!
Oh wow, I don’t think I had heard any of these words before. I learned something new! 😍
I love learning new words, so this was really a fun topic 🙂