The Big Book Of Words You Should Know To Sound Smart: A Guide for Aspiring Intellectuals

by Robert W. Bly

The ultimate word book for aspiring intellectuals!

The most compendious collection of words for aspiring scholars, this book helps you hold your own in intellectual discourse. Featuring 2,400 sophisticated, obscure, and obtuse terms, each page provides you with the definitions you need to know to lock academic horns with the clerisy. From antebellum and eleemosynary to impasto and putative, you will quickly master hundreds of erudite phrases that will improve your conversational elegance.

Complete with definitions and sample sentences for each entry, The Big Book of Words You Should Know to Sound Smart will elevate your lexicon as you impress the susurration out of the perfervid hoi polloi.

Genres: Nonfiction

338 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 4, 2015

About the author

Bob Bly is a freelance copywriter with 4 decades of experience in direct response and business-to-business marketing. He is the author of 100 published book on topics ranging from science, sex, satire, and science fiction -- to small business, writing, advertising, and online marketing. McGraw-Hill calls Bob Bly “America’s top copywriter.”

Reviews

[Sheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't a book you sit down and read right through as it is essentially a small dictionary, but I could see picking this up each day to learn one new word, similar to the word-a-day calendars. These aren't big, advanced words to try and impress others with, but less familiar, and infrequently used words. In fact, you'll already know a good many of the words such as pandemic, vortex, or lineage. A few other examples that I already knew are galleon, kibosh, bespoke, quibble, and hiatus. In my opinion, some of the words are quite common, like meander and faux, so perhaps a lot of us are conversing at a higher level than we previously presumed!

It's a fair mix of known and unknown vocabulary; a suitable reminder of known words that may have slipped the mind, alongside new and interesting possibilities. Unlike many other books of this sort, I can see learning a new word and actually having a chance of working it into a conversation.

Enjoy this new word for today accompanied by the melodious and witty example of proper usage. (It may even cause you to learn a second new word -- earworm. 😋)

selcouth: unusual

It's not selcouth to be loved by anyone.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Big Book Of Words You Should Know To Sound Smart: A Guide for Aspiring Intellectuals, by Robert W. Bly, is a dictionary style book with a loads of little used words in the English language, with their pronunciation marked and a sentence following using the word. This book has some fun words: aphorism, brachet, cynosure... etc. etc. There are 2400 such words in this book.

To start, this is a useful dictionary style reference book for writers, word geeks, or interested parties. It certainly keeps to its title; many of these words are not often used in regular speech and rare in their written form. One can definitely see the sophistication of the English language, and how it is rarely used to its fullest extent in most forms of writing and speech in the modern world. I, on the whole, enjoyed this book. A few criticisms persist; it is not a fun book to read cover to cover, which is a shame. Some more stories, paragraphs using the words, or even etymological information would have been useful and interesting. This book is much more enjoyable as a quick skim, and a keep for reference. One thing I really did not like about the book were its example sentences. Some of them are down right misogynist or ignorant, which shows the authors bias quite clearly. Bly does not seem to like vegetarians, government, etc. and many of the sentences come across as ignorant or downright aristocratic in their belittling tone toward groups of people the author does not understand. A bit too ignorant for an intellectual, maybe?

Besides these criticisms (which are mine and show my own bias), this book certainly has uses, and was a fun and speedy skim with interesting words, ideas and such to stretch out the lexicon a tad. Worth a look for sure.

[Paige · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I didn't technically "read" this book (it'd be like reading a small dictionary), I thought this book interesting. It lives up to its title, and it would be a great book to add to my collection.

[Karla · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a doctoral student, I believe I aspire to become intellectual, and my research focus is on vocabulary. That said, this was an amazing collection of words. As a word nerd, the family enjoyed some new vocabulary which spun conversation. I would much rather have this on my coffee table than a collection of photographs (although a collection of shoe photographs is a tough comparison). Some words may not set into my permanent vocabulary, but some were just fun to say and try to use once. It's enjoyable and worthwhile. I appreciate the author's time and diligence collecting such an anthology of words.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not expect to find numerous spelling and punctuation errors in a book by "America's top copywriter." Yet, here they are:

FOIN, location 1325: Gaelen made a foyn with his sword / Gaelen made a FOIN with his sword (FOIN is the word being defined, FOYN is the pronunciation) ;

NOMENCLATURE, loc 2976: has a nomenclature all it's own / has a nomenclature all ITS own ("It's" is ONLY used as a contraction of "it is" or "it has"; in all other cases, the proper word is "its") ;

PABULOUS, loc 3274: wished for a more pablous meal / wished for a more PABULOUS meal (correct spelling) ;

PANGRAM, loc 3345: The quick brown fox jumped swiftly over the lazy dog / The quick brown fox JUMPS over the lazy dog (correct pangram) ;

SATIETY, loc 4052: at the Whittington's New Year's gala / at the WHITTINGTONS' New Year's gala (plural possessive) ;

UNSAVORY, loc 4543: what happens in Washington DC, and we know / what happens in WASHINGTON, DC, and we know ;

ZIONISM, loc 4875: The Wasserstein's give charitably / The WASSERSTEINS give charitably (simple plural, not possessive) ;

ZOOMORPHIC, loc 4884: The Rossington's formal garden / The ROSSINGTONS' formal garden (plural possessive) .

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

A dictionary is much better than this book !....

Totally disappointed as the book just feels like an edited version of an dictionary and the book title also takes you off track.I assumed it would have some real life situations mentioned in it showing synonyms of the words which can be used in an sentence to sound like an smart intellect but was totally disappointed.

Also I don't get the point of mentioning technical terms such as coaxial,flux, rheostat, entropy etc.whats the use of these words in an normal conversation !?

The book also contains words like 'dabchick' which is a name of a bird.....it was like why does the author need to mention such things.

[And · Rating 2 out of 5]

disappointingly mundane

[Gav451 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Its basically a shorter dictionary. Excellent use of language, terrible plot.

I was expecting some comment / humour. What I got was a list of words. I did not read that much of it, once I realised what it was I could not see the point.

If you want to read some of a dictionary, this is the book for you. Otherwise get a dictionary.