English’s Beautiful Specificity

January 11, 2011 By 4 Comments

I love that English has a specific word just for someone wearing glasses, bespectacled.  Saves us several words on a regular basis.  Someone else just suggested to me another one, “defenestrate”,  a word for throwing things out of windows.  That’s right, throwing things out of windows gets its own word in English.

What other highly specific words make English great?  What other highly specific words do other languages have that we should add to make English’s collection more complete?

Your Words?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 4 Comments
  • Aaran Boyd

    I’m quite fond of the word expectorate which means to spit.

  • Mary Young

    I’m not sure if I can think of a specific word, but last semester my Latin teacher was Austrian. We would go over certain words like “pauper” and she would say, “what is it in English” and we would all respond “pauper.” And one day she commented, “I have to get used to this language that has a word for everything.” It made me proud lol.

  • http://www.freethinker.me.uk/ Anna Johnstone

    I like susurruss. The word to describe a rustling sound.

  • mikespeir

    English has a word for just about anything. That’s because it’s a mongrel language. Whenever we need a word that another language owns, we steal it. ;-)