Jay's Dictionary of Rare, Obsolete, Archaic, and Otherwise Interesting Words
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Guide:
Welcome to my dictionary of rare words. I've been compiling words on and off for about 10 months now, and the dictionary has grown to a modest but respectable size of about 2,550 words. It is a work in progress and will be updated frequently; I hope to complete my second alphabetic "pass" by this holiday season. For that reason, you'll notice it's rather top-heavy right now, with more words in A-F than elsewhere. Before you jump in, several comments about my methods.
Most importantly, this document will probably not be useful if you saw a word somewhere and want to know what it means. This compendium is in a sense the reverse of a dictionary, because the intended use is to browse through it looking for words that might be fun to use, or just interesting to know. As Daryl Zero says, "if you go looking for one thing, your chances of finding it are very small, because there are a lot of things in the world, and you're only looking for one of them. If you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good, because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them."
Word Choice
I tried to choose words that would be useful in modern discourse, so that if you don't mind constantly explaining yourself to lesser individuals, you can incorporate these words into your active vocabulary. But occasionally I did pick one out because of how absurdly specialized its usage seemed. Along the same lines, I mostly excluded words that are small variations in pronunciation or spelling from common modern words.
I placed no restrictions on the age of the words I included, some having first citations as far back as 725 AD. When the same word occurred as more than one part of speech (like quick and quickly), I only included one unless the definitions were significantly different--which one to include being an essentialy arbitrary decision.
Finally, although most of the words in here carry designations such as rare, obsolete, or archaic in dictionaries, not all of them do. Sometimes I failed to recognize a word's commonality because of the aforementioned mental fatigue, and sometimes I simply thought them nice enough to include anyway. So don't come to me complaining that a word really doesn't belong, that you knew it when you were in diapers--just feel quietly superior and move on.
Definitions
Information such as pronunciation, part of speech, transitive/intransitive, and such, has only been included when I thought it necessary at the time. Since I have often worked on this in conditions of extreme tiredness, and going through word after word exerts its own kind of mental fatigue, my judgment may not have been sound. If some sufficient information about a word is wanting, or my phonetic representation is ambiguous, please do let me know.
You'll sometimes see particles or prepositions in parentheses in a definition, like this:
wimple - to wrap (up)
This means what is in parentheses is used with the word, so that you would say "I wimpled it up."