#word use
dunno if this is gonna be like. at all useful, and i’ve more than likely mentioned it before, but when i wrote my 1920s manuscript (which had been my first secondary world fantasy in years) i kinda became obsessed with learning the etymology of words i used to make sure they’d exist in the time period/world (if, for instance, your world doesn’t have a fantasy France, words like champagne or armoire probably shouldn’t be in the vocabulary you use) bc, if not, they can really detract and distract from the story. i’ve practiced the same behavior ever since, though it was, admittedly, easier with 1920s bc a lot of the vocab is still in use today and/or bc i had an actual specific decade i was using for inspiration.
so when you’re world-building, choose a year (or a decade) you don’t want your world to exist beyond. with my witchling WIP, the decade i’ve chosen is the 1760s, so i don’t use a word that was invented past that decade. this is a good site to bookmark for this exact purpose, and this is a good site to find slang that was used in whichever year/decade you’ve chosen! anachronisms are bound to happen, and sometimes can’t be avoided, but reducing them is the best thing you can do for your world :)
