Favorite Words

Do you ever run across a word like supercilious or kerfuffle and chuckle a bit about how they sound? Or see karst or leitmotif and say to yourself, “I didn’t know there was a word for that.” Over the past few years, I’ve been collecting interesting words that I run across in articles, blogs, and occasionally books and magazines. There are over 1,200 of them in this app, along with examples of their use. Most of them are not used frequently in discourse but are used frequently enough that most readers will come across them from time to time.

This app has two modes. The first mode is a learning mode where the student becomes familiar with the words and their definitions. The second mode is a practice mode where the student views a definition, then picks the word out of a field of ten words. The student plays until all 10 words are identified.

Pick a category from the Categories option. I sorted the words into twenty categories so that you can practice them in manageable chunks. Many of the words fit into more than one category. The category Obscure or Specialized has words that you may not run across unless your tastes in blogs is similar to mine. Likewise, There’s a Word for That has words that you may never run across in real life unless you read specialized blogs. You can get a feel for the popularity of a word by the number of usage citations it has. Some of the words in the Pejorative Adjectives and New or Newly Popular Words categories are especially popular with certain writers. Show More