AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

There's a lot to love about Nigel Hayes of the Wisconsin Badgers. Now NCAA March Madness fans can add his impressive vocabulary to that list.

In a press conference held this Saturday in Omaha, Hayes decided to make things interesting for the stenographer in the room by working a string of 3-pointer-equivalent words into his statements, including cattywampus, onomatopoeia, antidisestablishmentarianism, soliloquy, quandary, zephyr, and xylophone. (Along with teammates Frank Kaminsky and Sam Dekker, Hayes had just been given a tour of the stenographer's machine, which recognizes common words. Video courtesy of the Badgers Twitter feed below.)

Q. Nigel, obviously if you look just statistically, you've taken quite a leap in the 3-point shooting, to whatever, and in other areas. Can you describe just the steps you took to kind of, you know, raise those parts of your game?

NIGEL HAYES: Hello, it works now. Before I answer that question, I would like to say a few words: cattywampus, onomatopoeia and antidisestablishmentarianism. (Laughs). Now, back to your question. It was just a lot of hard work, teammates giving me great confidence, and when you play with players that are very unselfish like the two next to me who also give you that confidence and involve the team, it's a lot easier to get things done.

Q. Why did you start off saying those things and then I have to follow-up.

NIGEL HAYES: Well, the wonderful young lady over there, I think her job title is a stenographer, yes, OK. And she does an amazing job of typing words, sometimes if words are not in her dictionary, maybe if I say soliloquy right now, she may have to work a little bit harder to type that word, or quandary, zephyr, Xylophone, things like that, that make her job really interesting.

At that point, a reporter gave up on trying to talk to Hayes about basketball and started a conversation just about words. "Are these words like you looked up or is this just a thing for you? Not that you didn't know, I'm just saying like you had a list ready to go."

NIGEL HAYES: No, I actually like words. It started from a younger age when my stepfather would tell me to read a lot of things, and I would read words and I would not know what it means, and then once I learned and I tried to read more words. Then it's just fun to know words, and you can say certain words that put people in a quandary, and they don't know what you're talking about. And it makes for more fun, I guess. I'm sorry for my usage of words. I didn't mean to make your job any more difficult!

Hayes later tweeted impeccable under the hashtag #sesquipedalian. Perhaps he should get in touch with other sports figures fascinated by words: R.A. Dickey and Chris Sale?