Is your English fluent? Do you believe you have a rich vocabulary? Then this post might prove challenging for you. It is said that there are about 171.000 words in modern English dictionaries. However, from all those, roughly only 3.000 are frequently used. Therefore it’s only natural that we don’t know all the words and that there are some we have never even heard of before.
Today we present 20 beautiful words that are not commonly known. The way they are presented is by having the word accompanied by a nice image related to the word and its definition. The style of the images may remind you of our inspiring travel quotes. Wanna see how many of them you recognize fellow lazy penguins?
Source: Link
1. Supine
From the Latin supīnus, Supine is an adjective that refers to what belongs to or relative to supination, the position of a person who is lying on the back or of a hand that shows the palm up).
2. Iridescent
Iridescent is a surface that creates an optical phenomenon showing different colors depending on the angle from which it is viewed. Currently, iridescent is used as an adjective to refer metaphorically to a person who is different because they reflect many colors instead of one.
3. Petrichor
Petricor is the name given to the smell that is produced after a certain amount of rain falls on dry soils, in areas where it has not rained in a relatively long period of time.
4. Bombinate
It means to make buzzing or humming noise, continued and gruff.
5. Limerence
An involuntary state that is characterized by an excessive search for emotional reciprocity, intrusive and obsessive thoughts, and emotional dependence on another person.
6. Serendipity
Serendipity is the valuable discovery that occurs accidentally or by chance. One of the most famous examples of this phenomenon is the discovery of penicillin, made by Fleming accidentally; yes, for it to happen he had to experiment for hundreds of hours.
7. Sonorous
It can be said that voiced words are those that have a voiced phoneme, that is, those words that allow there to be a vibration in the vocal cords.
8. Epoch
An era is a time period that can be distinguished or defined by the historical events that happened in it and determined its ways of life: “Victorian costumes are my favorites.”
9. Somnambulist
Sleepwalking involves getting up and walking while you are asleep. More frequent in children than in adults, sleepwalking is generally overcome before the age of ten. Isolated incidents of sleepwalking generally do not indicate a serious problem or require treatment.
10. Hiraeth
Nostalgia or feeling of grief and homesickness produced by the absence, deprivation or loss of a very dear person or thing: I feel great longing for the time we spent together.
11. Ineffable
Quite the irony in a post revolving around words and what they express. Ineffable is that which cannot be described or expressed. Ineffable is something so out of the ordinary that words cannot explain it. Ineffable is synonymous with indescribable, inexplicable, unspeakable, extraordinary and the antonym of explainable, describable, narrable, ordinary
12. Mellifluous
The word mellifluous comes from the Latin mellifluus, which in turn comes from two different words. It is composed of the word mellis which means honey or sweetness and the word fluere, referring to the verb flow, although this is not all that mellifluous means. Mellifluous means that it is sweet like honey or that it has some of these characteristics, although this is not all that mellifluous means.
13. Aquiver
Aquiver is a rhythmic shaking movement in one or more parts of the body. It’s involuntary, which means you can’t control it. The tremor occurs due to muscle contractions.
14. Effervescence
Effervescence is a process in which a chemical reaction occurs: in this reaction, gas escapes from an aqueous solution, bubbles are generated. In this case, the reaction means that as the gases do not have a defined shape and they expand, it causes the balloon to swell as the carbon dioxide expands.
15. Sonder
The understanding that each person has a life as intense and complex as ours. Sonder in German means “special” and in French it is used to “probe, explore, or dive. Both meanings were used for this word.
16. Defenestration
It is not often that this word has an actual use as most people don’t get thrown out of windows. Nonetheless, a word exists for this act.
17. Vellichor
It means something like ‘the nostalgic feeling of an old bookstore, full of books and stories that will never be read due to lack of time’.
18. Denouement
An outcome is understood as the conclusion of a work or more specifically the conclusion in a play. This concept is used at the end of artistic acts with human intervention, such as the outcome of a play, a soap opera, film, novel or performance.
19. Incandescence
Incandescence is the phenomenon of light emission due to heat energy. A body, reaching a certain temperature, emits a luminous radiation that is also characteristic of each substance.
20. Phosphenes
Ocular phosphenes are the visual sensation of perceiving flashes and points of light when you close your eyes or rub them very hard, but their recurrent presence can also be a symptom of various pathologies. Ocular phosphenes are normal when we rub our eyes or squeeze them hard.
