The Endangered English Dictionary: Bodacious Words Your Dictionary Forgot

by David Grambs

"Like animals, plants and book reviewers, words can become extinct, but Grambs is here to salvage the most missed of the lexical dinosaurs."―Patricia Holt, San Francisco Chronicle We often hear about the richness of the English language, how many more words it contains than French or German. And yet modern desk dictionaries are the result of a paring away of that glory, so that merely standard, functional, current words remain. The price we pay for such convenience is the thousands of delightful words we never see or hear. This book is an effort to save some of those words applicable to everyday life and countless word games from extinction. The resultant treasure trove of exotic verbal creatures is an indispensable resource for every lover of language. A selection:

Genres: Reference, Language, Nonfiction

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[M.T. Bostick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this useful for adding a challenging word to my Twitter messages. Had people actually looking up the words and reTweeting. It was fun.