Words with Old World Class!

I am still offline sick, so here is a continuation of a popular post series from last year. Comments are switched off, sorry. Last year I put up a few posts of out of use words sourced from an old Australian dictionary, circa 1900. They give an insight into why some words fall out of usage and how much society has changed focus.

Here is another list of older words to inspire and prompt you to write. If you’d like a challenge, put together a story or paragraph using at least four of the words.

AEsculapian: beloning to a medical man; word origin is a god of medicine. (Roman Mythology. The god of medicine and healing.) This is interesting as the modern definition is: relating to medicine or physicians. It is an adjective: archaic.
Smirch: to cloud, to smear, to dusk, to soil.
Civet: a strong musky perfume that comes from the Civet-cat.
Presuppose: to take for granted.
Theopneustic: given by or due to the inspiration of God / God-inspired.
Ratiocinate: to reason or argue. ( Ratiocinative: argumentative.)
Wastel: a round cake made from fine flour.
Mensuration: act, process or the art of measuring. (That is an art? Ok then…)
Zoophilist: a lover of animals. (Don’t take that in an amorous sense.)
Demogorgon: a terrible god capable of the most vindictive action.

This blog post by Cate Russell-Cole is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You are free to share and adapt it.

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