Anyone seeking out a rich and unusual vocabulary need search no further than the pages of an old book. It doesn't have to be a dusty volume shedding its leather binding into your coffee like so much unwanted nutmeg. Vocabulary-rich literary classics are rife with words that used to be part of everyday speech and now we encounter much less often. And as a bonus, they're available in newly released paperback classics or even in e-book form.
In a recent piece in The Guardian's Books Blog, author and journalist Darragh McManus delved into the land of archaic literature with an Oxford University Press collection of Gothic fiction, Tales of the Macabre. He found himself standing back to marvel at "a single sentence of 89 words, some unfamiliar, the entire passage peculiar and evocative, [and] almost gratuitously verbose in this era of controlled prose and a 'less is more' aesthetic." He wrote:
There's a challenge to unfamiliar words, or even vaguely recognised ones; you can't "skim-read" as normal, but must make your way in a stately fashion through each sentence. Each is a surprise in itself; your mind is constantly forced to check itself, think back over what it's processed, and ask, "Do I know what that means? Do I think I know? Can I guess at the meaning from its context?" (And sometimes, you don't really want to know anyway.)
I love old words anyway, and those moments when you stumble upon one that's strange to you. It's especially nice if the word itself is, well, especially nice. For instance, "slumbrously", which I came across recently in a review – what a gorgeous assemblage of letters and sounds. "Slumbrously" … you can almost physically feel the sensation of drifting into sleep, sinking drowsily onto a soft pillow in a cradle of dreaming.
This anthology is bursting with them: tristful, howbeit, swinge-bucklers, horripilation, sooth, beseem, maugre, haute, orgulous, agnize, beadsmen, racqueters, scatterlings, ribalds, wasselers, giglots, ronyons, bonarobas, ostent, amort, nathless … Ods Pitikins!
For a funny take on the joys of archaic language, go back on our blog to a video of comedian John Branyan's Elizabethan-style retelling of "The Three Little Pigs."