#vocabulary
as someone who is not a native enlgish language and very often struggles to find appropriate ways of describing words in my writing, this site is very helpful. you just type up a word, receive really cool adjectives and if you don’t know the meaning of a word, you can just click on it and the definition pops up.
Tell me which one you’ve used/heard the most:
1. 全くその通り。(mattaku sono touri) Absolutely
2. 私も同じ考えです。(watashi mo onaji kangae desu) That’s exactly how I feel
3. 全く同感です。(mattaku doukan desu) I couldn’t agree with you more
4. 間違いありません。(machigai arimasen) No doubt about it
5. もちろんです。(mochiron desu) Of course
P.S.: if anyone can clarify what kind of situation it’d be best to use them that would be great!
P.S.2.: this is obviously not a comprehensive list, just showing some different ways to agree with people. And thanks to everyone for the corrections!
хозяин - (n) boss, chief, employer; landlord; owner, proprietor
настроение - (n) emotions, mood, spirits
чудак - (n) strange person, eccentric
спор - (n) dispute, controversy, argument
преступник - (n) criminal
саботаж - (n) sabotage
полиция - (n) police
Review/Oбзор
завистливый - (adj) envious
бескорыстный - (adj) unselfish
бескорыстный труд - labor of love
ценить - (v) to appreciate, to value highly
вздыхать/вздохнуть - (v) to sigh; to yearn for, to pine after
ухаживать - (v) to take care of, to look after; to court, to date
заигрывать/заиграть - (v) to flirt; to make advances
сердце - (n) heart; temper; anger; darling, love, sweetheart
пара - (n) couple, pair
New Words/Hовые Cлова
рот - (n) mouth
знакомый - (adj.) familiar, acquainted (with); (n) acquaintance, friend
любить/полюбить - (v) to love, to like, to be fond of
страсть - (n) passion; strong love; strong obsession with, attraction to some activity
ухаживать - (v) to take care of, to look after; to court, to date
Review/Oбзор
страшно - (adv) terrifyingly; very, very badly
тотчас - (adv) immediately, at once
наверняка - (adv) certainly, for sure; safely
весело - (adv) happily, merrily, cheerfully
безполезно - (adv) uselessly
вдруг - (adv) suddenly
New Words/Hовые Cлова
чудно - (adv) wonderfully, beautifully
мрачно - (adv) gloomily, dismally
только - (adv) only, but
уже - (adv) already
весело - (adv) happily, merrily, cheerfully
Online English Vocabulary Size Test
My Vocabulary Size is about: 【29810】! What about you?
Finally got around to this, and it seems about right, really - I was reading on a 12th grade level in elementary school, and never stopped loving books, spelling bees, vocab tests… I was a nerd who loved English Lit. classes (and even willingly wrote one of my first book reports on Dracula!).
I will say, though… some of what this test considers synonyms/antonyms are a bit of a stretch.
elf
Elves are fun because there are so many vastly different interpretations. Everything from Santa’s toymakers to Elrond and his court qualify into our concept of elven forms.
Generally speaking, we might define elfas being a “spirit, sprite, fairy or goblin; some kind of usually mischievous supernatural creature.” This same definition existed for the Middle English term elf,alternately recorded as alfeorelfe.In Old English, the word was ælf,still retaining its meaning of “sprite, incubus or fairy,” but specifically with a masculine connotation. The feminine version of the word was ælfen, which interestingly is the predecessor to our modern adjectival form elven.
The word branches out of the Germanic family, and we can point to some other connected words in Old High German, like alp which meant “nightmare.” There is actually an Old English cognate which is ælfádl, also meaning “nightmare,” but more literally, “elf-disease.” Another interesting elf-induced sickness was though to be hiccups, which is reflected in the OE translation ælfsogoða.
Beyond this era of the Old English and German there is some debate about where the words originally sprouted from. The trail may be related to albusoralphoúsἀλφούς, the Latin and Ancient Greek terms for “white” respectively. The cultural theory implies that elves were considered beings of light, brightness and beauty, and thus as this concept evolved from those ideas, so did the English form out of the adjectives.
romantic
Somethingromanticis “marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized,” noted “by expressions of love or affection,” or else is possibly “impractical in conception and plan.” I still somehow find even the less “charming” definitions to be oddly “adventurous;” it reminds me of Bilbo setting off on a grand, romantic adventure with little preparation or readiness for what he was about to find out across the mountains.
The English is a cognate to the French romantique,and although there is some debate about which of the modern variants came first, the Middle English rommantdefinitely came from the Old French romaunt.
Interestingly, a less evolved linguistic descendent is still present in English as romaunt,which is an archaic term meaning “a romantic story told in verse,” or more simply, “a romance.” The Old French romanzis at the root of these words, referring to “stories, songs” and the Old French language itself, which at that time was an emerging variety of the Latin spoken in the region. This makes it even easier to tie the French to the Latin romanus,meaning “Roman” more broadly.
I found this word in a YA fantasy book I was reading recently (because… yeah), and it took me a bit by surprise; it sounded a little out of place. So, I thought I’d find out what place it occupies exactly and tell you all about it.
Copseis actually a contraction of an older word coppice, meaning “a thicket of small trees or shrubs,” which emerged probably in the late 1500s. The English is a borrowing from the French copeiz, which has the same definition, but an additional connotation of “an overcut forest,” relating to a commercial, farming idea. This is present in some readings of the English.
Admittedly I had some trouble tracking down the Old French version, and there were hints of it existing as possibly copeiz,coupizin the 1770s, and either couppeizorcopeisin some other places.
Nevertheless, the French was the bridge between the modern English and it’s Latin predecessor, colaphus, a noun meaning a “blow or cuff, perhaps a smack on the ear.” Although the “forest” meaning is lost here, this is where we can pick up the submeaning of “cutting down trees” which died out as the word evolved. This particular Latin word is also related to others in the language meaning “cutting,” or “being cut,” a nod to the Ancient Greek cognate κόλαφος kolaphos, which is “a blow or buffet.”
sonrisa
This has always been one of my favorite words in Spanish; sonrisa, meaning “smile.” I particularly liked it because it reminded me of the English word sunrise, purely I think due to the phonetic similarities but the analogy was still very nice: a smile like a sunrise, which lights up a face in the way the sun lends light to the horizon.
The Spanish is actually a derivation of the Latin term subrisa, a conjugation of the word subrideo. This comes from two parts, the first being sub, or “under,” and the second being rideo, which is “to laugh.” The verb encompasses both the nicer meanings of “a happy chuckle,” and the more perjorative “ridicule or mock.”
Interestingly, the Latin rideois also the root for another Spanish word, reír, meaning “to laugh.” Thus, although risaandreírare not quite the same words in Spanish, they come from the same place in Latin.
I find myself running into interesting Irish words very frequently, and one I found recently I quite liked was plobaireacht, meaning “blubbering, spluttering or babbling, particularly trying to speak, but being unable to while crying.”
I couldn’t come up with much of an etymology, but this looks a lot like another word piobaireachd,(which is a Scottish Gaelic term that has also been adopted into English), meaning “bagpipe music.” I don’t think the two are related in the slightest, but I suppose bagpipes might also make you difficult to understand whilst trying to speak.
leed
Apparently this is a more dialectally isolated term, but in some dialects of Scottish English (among others), this means “a song or poem, a strain of a song or a repeated verse,” which I quite like.
Anyways, there is an Old English term for “poems or song” which is alternately recorded as either leoþorléoð.Within the language at that point, there were several nice compounds such as léoðcræft,“poetry, the craft of song” andléoðorún“wise counsel or advice sent through song or poems” (which was apparently a thing they needed a word for?)
This is most often attributed to the PIE root leu-, an onomatopoeic root for expressives and interjections. Interestingly, this is also the base for the Latin term laudāre, which through a separate linguistic thread gives us the modern English term laud, “praise, glory, reknown, etc.”
ameliorate
I looked this word up a few years ago to use in an essay, and it has since become one of my favorite words. It has a lovely meaning (”to improve, perfect or enhance”), and it just feels nice to say.
It arrived in English around the 1650s as a backformation of the French améliorer, from the Old French meillor, which you might recognize as being related to the modern French meilleur “better.”
The Latin root melior,of the same meaning, was influenced by the Ancient Greek term μάλα mala, a term imparting an adverbial meaning of “very much, exceedingly.” Ultimately, it likely came from the reconstructed PIE mel-, “big and strong.”
Before I explain some of the really cool history of this word, I’ll divvy it up into its etymological parts:
Firstly,disasteras a whole was borrowed from the Italian diasastro,a compound of two halves: the prefix diswhich is similar to its English cognate and simply means “not, undo, against,” while astromeans “star,” from the Latin astrumof the same meaning. The Greek basis for the Latin, ᾰ̓́στρον astron,had a broader definition coming from the synonymous ᾰ̓στήρ aster,and could refer to the stars or planets, constellations, the sun and celestial bodies more generally.
ᾰ̓στήρ is also interesting because it is also noted as being able to mean “songbirds, starfish, flame or light, honorable persons” and possibly “blue daisies.”
At the root of all this is the Proto-Indo-European reconstructed root for star, ster, which is also connected to the Greek term for “lightning.”
Hopefully with this background, the semantics might make a little more sense. Although we tend to use the modern dictionary definition, which is “a sudden calamity or misfortune,” the older sense the word is derived from is “an unfavorable aspect of the planets or stars” in the astrological sense. Before the advent of astronomy as a science, the purpose of the practice of astrology was more so focused on looking for guidance and predictions regarding human life and activities. If the stars appeared to point to a negative outcome, it could be called a disaster, a dis- (negative, poor, undone) aster(position of the stars).
We also have a few other English and Latin terms which pull on these same ideas, but appeared through other layers of morphological construction. Namely, we have “lucky star,” “ill-starred,” and “star-crossed” as well as “astrum sinistrum,” which literally means “unfortunate star or misfortune.”
bócastréon
Old English term for the week: bócastréon,meaning “library, a place for books.”
Bócais a form of the Old English for “book,” and it actually combines into a lot of other interesting compounds which I really like (I did an old post a while ago on bóccræft, “literature, science or learning”).
Streónmeant “wealth, accumulation, treasure,” and the like, making for the entire word to imply a “treasured trove of books.”
“Library” could also be referred to by the word bocchord, which I think is equally cute: hordis whence comes our modern English hoard,which makes a library sound like a dragon’s treasure, hidden under some misty mountains on the other side of the world.
b*tches love lost words. it’s me, i’m b*tches
adelaster - provisional name for a plant whose flowers are unknown
aerolith - stone that falls from the sky; meteorite
aestival - of, like or pertaining to summer
aeviternal - everlasting; endless
aeviternity - eternal existence
agromania - intense desire to be in open spaces
amaranth - imaginary flower reputed never to fade
amaranthine - immortal; undying; deep purple-red colour
andromania - nymphomania
antejentacular - before breakfast
anteloquy - a preface
antichthon - hypothetical second Earth on the opposite side of the sun
aphrodisiomania - abnormal sexual interest
apiarian - of, like or pertaining to bees or beekeeping
arreptitious - ecstatic; frantic; hasty or hurried
asceticism - doctrine that self-denial of the body permits spiritual enlightenment
astrologaster - a foolish or petty astrologer
atrabiliary - melancholy; hypochondriac
Beatlemania - obsession with the Beatles
belonephilia - sexual obsession with sharp objects
blackmaster - undertaker
bloviate - to write or speak windily
broma - food; aliment
bufotenine - hallucinogen found in certain tropical toads
calamist - piper; one who plays using a reed
charientism - expression of an unpleasant thing in an agreeable manner; euphemism
chernozem - black earth typically found in cool grassland climates
cremaster - muscle by which the testicles are suspended
duncical - stupid; dim-witted
ecmnesia - loss of memory of the events of a specific period
ecophene - range of phenotypes produced by a genotype in a given environment
ecphrasis - plain interpretation of a thing
fane - flag or banner; weather-cock
flivver - cheap car or airplane
issles - sparks; embers
iterant - repeating; echoing
iulus - millipede
izzard - archaic name for the letter Z
jow - to ring a bell; a stroke of a bell
lavolta - lively bouncy dance for two persons
lycanthropy - mythical ability of humans to turn into wolves; werewolfism
mazy - dizzy; confused; labyrinthine; convoluted
niff - an unpleasant smell
obfuscate - to obscure; to darken; to confuse
poudrin - small ice crystals
quab - to throb; to quiver
quarion - candle
querimonious - full of complaints
zatch - female genitalia
I’m doing this as much for myself to review as I am for anyone who might be interested.
Croatian uses traditional Slavic names for the months instead of the Gregorian names for the months.
Here they are:
Jan. – siječanj
Feb. – veljača
Mar. – ožujak
Apr. – travanj
May – svibanj
Jun. – lipanj
Jul. – srpanj
Aug. – kolovoz
Sep. – rujan
Oct. – listopad
Nov. – studeni
Dec. – prosinacThese are all masc. nouns and decline as such. Fun fact: studeni is an adj. so you have to be careful when declining it.
Ex.:u siječnju is “in January” but “in November” is u studenom.
