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About This Quiz
You'll love this quiz if you use obscure words to impress your friends with the depth and breadth of your vocabulary, or simply to learn a new and unfamiliar word for fun and interest. Or mayhap you enjoy Shakespeare's work and love old English phrases. For whatever reason you enjoy obscure words, it is easier to intuit their meaning in context, than on their own. However, if you know root words, prefixes, and suffixes, you may do surprisingly well on this quiz. For instance, "colloquy" is another word for "conversation." It is related to the better-known term "soliloquy." But as the prefix indicates, a "colloquy" is with another person, and a "soliloquy" is solo --like Hamlet's famous speech.ÂÂ
What is wonderful about the English language is that it is dynamic, ever-growing and ever-changing. Our society creates new words all the time for modern products, concepts and situations. Where else would "e-mail" come from or the commonly understood and accepted terms, including "e-book", "e-cash", and "e-commerce"? From new medical and environmental developments to technological advances, words help us describe our world. Challenge your cohorts to see which one of you can showcase your knowledge of English's backbencher words fastest. Take the quiz anon!
Something with "eurythmy" has good ____.
Height
Flavor
Rhythm or proportion
"Eurythmy" can refer to a building, a musical composition, an artistic piece, or more. Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart adopted it for their stage name: The Eurhythmics.
Size
What is a "cohort"?
A companion
"Cohort" hasn't really dropped out of favor that much. It used to mean "a tenth of a Roman legion," and survives as a term for a colleague or supporter.
A dragon
An upper-respiratory infection
A dictionary
If something is a "misnomer," it is poorly _____.
Funded
Named
"Misnomer" started life as a term from something that is mis-named. But it's broadened to mean "misunderstood," as many people learned when Trump used it that way in January 2018. (Merriam-Webster, who supported Obama on "enormity," also backed Trump up here).
Dressed
Executed
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"Froward" means _______.
Away from
At the stern of a ship
Perverse, stubborn
Both #1 and #3
"Froward" is the long-unused opposite of "toward." So it can mean "away from," but also used to mean "willful" or deliberately doing the opposite of what is desired.
When someone uses the expression "all told," what does "told" mean?
Counted
"Tell" in early modern English meant "count." In 'Hamlet,' one of the guards sees the king's ghost walking "as long as one might tell a hundred," meaning the amount of time it might take to count to a hundred.
Forgotten
Spoken of
Set aside
What is an agendum?
A Latin declension
A genderless individual
The singular of "agenda"
It's true, we usually say that a meeting has "an agenda." But the strictest of word snobs would point out that that means the meeting has more than one list of things to cover -- because in Latin, "agenda" is plural.
This is not a real word
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What is the best definition of "mayhap"?
Delightful
Lovely
Maybe
"Mayhap" is an old-fashioned term meaning "perhaps." You find it in Shakespeare's work and, more broadly, Elizabethan English.
Unfortunate
A "colloquy" is a fancy term for a ______.
Conversation
"Colloquy" is related to the better-known term "soliloquy." But as the first syllables indicate, a "co-lloquy" is with another person, and a "soliloquy" is solo -- like Hamlet's famous speech.
Group of 10 people
Work of art
Zoo
What does "meet" mean (when it doesn't mean "encounter in person")?
Appropriate
You'll still hear this one in certain church liturgies (a call-and-response part of the service). For example, "Let us call upon the Lord" would be followed by "It is meet and right so to do."
Food
Love
It has no other meaning
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To "glister" means to _______.
Ache
Gleam
Though rarely used in conversation, this one remains famous because of its use in "The Merchant of Venice." The famous line from the poem-within-a-play is "All that glisters is not gold."
Buy
Sell
Instead of "anon," we would now probably say ____.
"Be"
"Secret"
"Right"
"Soon"
This is another Shakespeare staple."Anon" means "soon," "right away," or sometimes, "I'm coming!"
Where would you find a "penult"?
A kitchen
A hospital
A school
A word
A "penult" is the next-to-last syllable of a word. An "antepenult" is the syllable before that. These terms are used when you're learning where to put the emphasis in a word.
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What is a "temblor"?
A huge book
An earthquake
"Temblor" is just a highfalutin' word for earthquake. No one really uses it in conversation, but newspaper writers rely on it as a synonym when they're writing stories about recent geological upheavals.
A piece of construction equipment
A chamber of the human heart
What did "pale" mean when it used to be a noun?
Bird
Fence
This meaning survives in two places in modern English. One is the expression "beyond the pale," which means "beyond the boundary of good taste." The second is the word "palings," the timbers that hold up a pier at the ocean.
Jealousy
Wind instrument
The best meaning of "junta" is ______.
Connection
Rainforest
Ruling circle
"Junta" comes from Spanish and became well-known in the 1980s and 90s, in news coverage of Latin American governments overthrown by small groups of powerful military leaders. Eventually it made its way into coverage of non-Latin American countries, with descriptions of "juntas" in former Soviet republics.
Star cluster
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The word for excessive or nonstop talking is _______.
Bibliophilia
Piquerism
Logorrhea
"Logorrhea" uses the same suffix as "diarrhea," because both refer to a flow that won't seem to stop. In psychology, when a patient speaks hurriedly and excessively, it's often known as "pressured speech."
Speakeasiness
The word "sooth" generally means ______.
Bird
Love
Sky
Truth
This is why a fortune-teller used to be called a "soothsayer" -- they were said to see the future "truly," as opposed to people who could only guess at it. Don't confuse it with "soothe," which means to comfort.
The best definition of "doughty" is _______.
Dubious
Loving
Overweight
Valiant
"Doughty" is all over early modern English, usually in descriptions of knights and warriors. Some writers use it nowadays to be slightly tongue-in-cheek when describing bravery.
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Who are the "hoi polloi"?
Chickens
Common people
"Hoi polloi" is a Greek borrowing. It means average or common people.
Government leaders
Audience members
If someone yells "Gardyloo!", what are you supposed to do?
Catch a thief
Close the door
Praise God
Watch out for falling water
"Gardyloo" was the English corruption of the French "Garde a l'eau!" or "Look out for the water!" People in upper-story windows used it when they tossed out graywater from washing dishes or cooking. Indoor plumbing has rendered it unnecessary.
Which of these signs is an "octothorpe?"
@
#
This humble sign has three names: the rare "octothorpe," the common "pound sign," and the 21st-century "hashtag."
&
^
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If a bird is a passerine, it has ______.
Blue plumage
Flight capability
The power of song
Toes
Passerines are perching birds; they have claw-like toes. This differentiates them from birds like ducks, which have webbed feet.
"Folderol" means ______.
Food
Medicine
Nonsense
"Folderol" is a word for silliness or nonsense. It's probably derived from a meaningless refrain in old songs: "Fol-de-rol, fol-de-rol."
Papers
What kind of insect is a "pismire"?
An ant
This one's obscure indeed -- but some people might know it because of Thomas Harris's bestselling book, "Red Dragon." The killer in that book uses it to describe a tabloid reporter whom he deems insignificant.
A fly
A grasshopper
A wasp
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What does "cozen" mean?
To remain a virgin
To be honest with
To serve
To trick or swindle
Again, this is a word pulled out of dusty obscurity by Thomas Harris. In "The Silence of the Lambs," Clarice Starling is put off by a TV news reporter's "cozening manner." (Harris seems to have loved archaic words and hated reporters).
What part of speech is "contumely"?
Adjective
Adverb
Noun
"Contumely" means "verbal abuse or scorn." English has several words that end in "-ly" that aren't adverbs. They include "lovely," "homely," and "timely," which are all primarily adjectives.
Verb
What is "conturbation"?
Acceleration
Deceleration
A promotion
Turmoil
"Conturbation" means "disturbance or turmoil." Like many of the words in this quiz, it's rarely used nowadays.
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If you have the "ague," what do you have?
A hard job
Insomnia
A fever and chills
"Ague" is an older English term for a fever, usually accompanied by chills. In a poem, Lord Byron complained of having it after swimming the Hellespont.
A crush
In the strictest sense, "enormity" means _____
divinity
intelligence
vagueness
wickedness
President Obama was criticized for using this word to mean "great size," when language purists point out it means "cruelty" or "evil." But Obama was only using the meaning that's become fairly common in recent decades.
What would you probably do with "bibelots"?
Collect them
"Bibelots" are otherwise known as trinkets, gewgaws, or knick-knacks. Some of us do avoid them, but many others collect them.
Eat them
Ride them
Avoid them
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"Dipsomania" is an old-fashioned term for what?
Alcoholism
Few fields have updated their terminology as much as psychology. "Dipsomania" became "alcoholism," and is now more often diagnosed as "alcohol abuse disorder."
Hoarding
Problems with anger management
Overeating
Without an apostrophe, "cant" means _____.
Lake
Pond
Insincere philosophizing
"Cant" refers to platitudes that many people say, but few people act on. This includes vows to "move to Canada" when an opposition-party candidate is elected president.
A hybrid of cockroach and ant
"Emanent" means _______.
About to happen
Coming from a source
"Emanent" is a rarely-used variation on the verb "emanate," meaning "to come or stem from." Don't confuse it with "imminent," meaning "about to happen," or "eminent," meaning "highly thought of."
Related to voting
Highly educated
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If you've had an episode of "enuresis," you'll need to change your ________.
Bedsheets
"Enuresis" is a medical term for "bedwetting." It's derived from the Greek word for "urine."
Car's oil
Career path
Shoes
What on earth is a "chrestomathy"?
An anthology
The literary critic and satirist H. L. Mencken dusted off this old term when he called one of his collections "A Mencken Chrestomathy." %0D%0DSpeaking of eminent wordsmiths, we'd like to give a shoutout here to Charles Harrington Elster, whose book "What In the Word?" helped us find some rare words for this quiz. And also to the folks at Merriam-Webster, whose site is a joy for any logophile to visit!
A form of divination
A tendency to smile
A tendency to frown
You Got:
/35
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