15 Rare English Words Worth Knowing, and Where They Come From

English has hundreds of thousands of words, yet most of us get through the week on a few thousand. Tucked away in old dictionaries, regional glossaries and medieval poems are words for things everyone does but nobody can name: lying awake at four in the morning fretting, pretending to be ill to dodge work, tipping a sauce bottle upside down to rescue the last drop. Below are fifteen of the best, grouped by theme, each with a plain definition, a fresh example sentence and a note on where it came from.

A quick word on numbers: older versions of this list promised sixteen words but only ever printed fifteen. Every one of them is here.

Where these rare words come from

Many of the entries were popularised by Mark Forsyth's 2012 book The Horologicon, which walks through an ordinary day and offers a forgotten word for each stage of it, from waking up to stumbling home. Forsyth mined sources such as Scottish dialect dictionaries, Tudor phrase books and eighteenth-century slang collections. Others, like serendipity and metanoia, are perfectly current but feel exotic because we rarely need them.

Several of the definitions travelled around the internet on illustrated word cards made by the Tumblr blog Other Wordly, which designed the image at the top of this page. Where a popular definition turned out to be wrong or garbled, we say so below.

Words for moving, walking and driving

Balter (verb)

To dance clumsily but happily, with zero technique and plenty of joy. Think of a wedding reception after midnight.

Example: "Nobody at the party could dance, but by the last song all of us were baltering anyway."

Scuddle (verb)

To hurry about in a showy way so that you look busy. It describes performance rather than progress.

Example: "Whenever the manager walked past, Tom would scuddle between the printer and his desk carrying the same blank sheet."

Chork (verb)

To make the squelching sound of walking in shoes that are full of water. It is an imitative word: say it slowly and you can almost hear wet socks.

Example: "After stepping in the flooded gutter, she chorked the whole way to the bus stop."

Pedeconference (noun or verb)

A meeting held while walking. The idea has come back into fashion as the "walking meeting", which some managers prefer because people tend to talk more openly side by side than across a table.

Example: "We solved the budget problem during a twenty-minute pedeconference around the park."

Jehu (noun)

A fast, reckless driver. The word comes from Jehu, a king of Israel described in the Second Book of Kings (2 Kings 9:20), where a lookout recognises him from a distance because he drives his chariot furiously.

A popular version of this list claimed Jehu was rushing to murder King Ahab. That is not what the Bible says. Ahab was already dead; Jehu went after Ahab's son King Joram (also called Jehoram), killed him with an arrow, and then had Ahab's widow Jezebel thrown from a window.

Example: "The taxi driver was a true jehu, and we reached the airport with our knuckles white."

Words for small everyday habits

Duffifie (verb)

To lay a bottle on its side or upside down so the last drops drain out. It comes from Scots dialect, and anyone who has balanced a nearly empty shampoo bottle on its cap has done it.

Example: "The ketchup had been duffifying in the fridge door since Sunday, and it was finally ready for chips."

Zarf (noun)

A holder for a hot cup that has no handle. The word comes from Arabic ẓarf, meaning a container or envelope. Traditional zarfs held small porcelain coffee cups in Turkey and the Middle East and were often made of silver, brass or copper, sometimes more richly decorated than the cups themselves. In the nineteenth century, workshops in Geneva produced enamelled zarf sets for export. The cardboard sleeve on a takeaway coffee, invented in 1991, is a modern disposable zarf.

Example: "The café ran out of zarfs, so I carried my latte wrapped in a napkin."

Egrote (verb)

To fake illness to avoid work or duty. It descends from the Latin aegrotare, "to be sick", which also gave us the British university term aegrotat, a degree awarded to a student too ill to sit final exams.

Example: "He egroted so convincingly on Monday that his colleagues sent flowers."

Words for love, worry and changing your life

Redamancy (noun)

Loving someone back who loves you; love that is returned in full. It is built on the Latin redamare, "to love in return", and turns up in English dictionaries from the seventeenth century. It is rare enough to be a lovely discovery and clear enough that you can explain it in one sentence.

Example: "Their marriage lasted fifty years on a steady diet of patience and redamancy."

Uhtceare (noun)

The anxious wakefulness of the hours before dawn, when worries feel larger than they are. Pronounce it roughly "OOHT-keh-ah-ruh". It joins two Old English pieces: uht, the last stretch of night before daybreak, and ceare, care or sorrow. Forsyth's book made it famous, and it is reportedly found in Old English poetry, though modern speakers have adopted it far more than the Anglo-Saxons ever used it.

Example: "The night before the interview, uhtceare had her rehearsing answers to the ceiling at five o'clock."

If early-morning worry is a regular visitor rather than an occasional one, it is worth talking to a doctor.

Metanoia (noun)

A deep change of heart or direction in life. The Greek word joins meta (beyond, after) and noeō (to perceive or think). In the Greek New Testament it is usually translated as "repentance", but its sense is wider: a turning around of the whole person.

Earlier versions of this list said Carl Jung used the word for the psyche's way of healing itself. Jung did describe breakdowns as possible attempts at self-repair, but it was later writers in the Jungian tradition who attached the label metanoia to that idea.

Example: "Losing his job turned out to be the start of a metanoia; two years later he was teaching and happier than ever."

Serendipity (noun)

A happy discovery made by accident. Unlike most words here, this one has a known birthday. The writer Horace Walpole coined it in a letter dated 28 January 1754, borrowing it from a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes keep finding things they were not looking for. Serendip is an old name for Sri Lanka.

Example: "Penicillin is the classic case of scientific serendipity: a contaminated dish that changed medicine."

Words for politics and public life

Snollygoster (noun)

A clever but unprincipled person, especially a politician who serves himself rather than the public. It is nineteenth-century American slang of uncertain origin; one theory links it to the snallygaster, a monster of Maryland folklore, another to a Pennsylvania German phrase meaning "quick spirit". British MPs revived it during the 2009 expenses scandal.

Example: "The council needed a planner with vision and instead got a snollygoster with friends in construction."

Throttlebottom (noun)

A harmless, ineffective person who holds public office. It does not mean "dishonest", as some lists claim. The word comes from Alexander Throttlebottom, the forgettable Vice President in the Gershwin musical Of Thee I Sing, which opened on Broadway in December 1931. The joke of the character is that nobody can remember who he is; he even ends up joining a tour of the White House.

Example: "The committee chair was no villain, just a throttlebottom who never read the reports."

A word from old horse-dealers' slang

Feague (verb)

In its literal sense, this was a dishonest horse-dealer's trick: inserting a piece of raw ginger (and, in some accounts, a live eel) into a horse's rear so the animal would carry its tail high and look lively at market. The word appears in eighteenth-century slang dictionaries such as Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Figuratively, to feague someone is to gee them up or spur them into action.

Example: "The coach's half-time speech feagued the whole team back into the game."

How to use rare words well

Rare words are fun, but they work best as seasoning. A few practical tips:

Explain on first use. Drop the definition into the same sentence, as in "she lay awake with uhtceare, that pre-dawn worry". Readers feel included rather than tested.
Pick words that fill a real gap. Zarf, duffifie and pedeconference name things with no everyday single-word name, which is why they stick.
Check the meaning before you use it. As jehu, metanoia and throttlebottom show, popular word lists often garble definitions or stories. A good dictionary is worth thirty seconds.
Learn in context. Vocabulary research generally finds that words met repeatedly in reading stay longer than words memorised from lists. Writing your own example sentence, as we did above, helps the word settle.

One common myth is that a bigger vocabulary automatically makes you sound smarter. In practice, the most persuasive writers use plain language most of the time and reach for an unusual word only when it says something no ordinary word can. That is exactly the test these fifteen pass.

Sources: Wikipedia: The Horologicon (Mark Forsyth); Wikipedia: Jehu; Wikipedia: Zarf; Wikipedia: Metanoia (psychology); Wikipedia: Serendipity; Wiktionary: snollygoster; Wikipedia: Of Thee I Sing; Merriam-Webster: throttlebottom; Wiktionary: feague. Word-card image by Other Wordly; list first shared via I Heart Intelligence.

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