Your New English Words

[roddy]

Imprest - "a fund used by a business for small items of expenditure and restored to a fixed amount periodically." 

 

Think it's basically the petty cash type of thing. 

[skylee]

I know "imprest"! Yeah! (Although I failed in accounting.)

[Guest realmayo]

Impressive!

[imron]

boustrophedonic - a writing system that alternates reading direction between left-to-right and right-to-left on subsequent lines.

[MPhillips]

Like an ox plowing a field!

[imron]

Someone's been looking up word etymologies

[roddy]

You underestimate the membership, Imron, they don't need to look this kind of stuff up. They just know it. 

 

Laic - an adjective form of lay, as in secular, not of the clergy. 

[roddy]

And another: In archival science, a fonds is the aggregation of documents that originate from the same source.

[liuzhou]

I already knew most of the words here, but not all.

 

One I came across recently is 'kakistocracy', meaning "The government of a state by the worst citizens. "

 

Pretty useful in China. 

[fanglu]

archival science

And I thought economics was supposed to be the dismal science.

[geraldc]

Shroff. An English word I've only found in Hong Kong car parks

[skylee]

I think I have read somewhere that the word Shroff originated in India.

[liuzhou]

"shroff, n.

 

(ʃrɒf)

 

Also 7 sheroff, -affe, -iffe, sharoffe, sherrafe, shraff, shrofe, 7–8 sheraff.

 

[Anglo-Indian corruption of saraf.]

 

A banker or money-changer in the East; in the Far East, a native expert employed to detect bad coin."

 

-Oxford English Dictionary

 

Why that would be used in a Hong Kong car park, I can't say.

[Shelley]

The definition I found for it

 

shroff

ʃrɒf/

noun

noun: shroff; plural noun: shroffs

1. 1.

   Indian

   a banker or money changer.
2. 2.

   SE Asian

   a cashier.

    

    

    

I think "cashier" in this context refers to person who collects parking charges.

[Michaelyus]

A couple of medical terms:

The Greek-derived icterus for something more commonly described with a certain French-derived term.

h(a)emoptysis 

[roddy]

Limnology - the study of freshwater lakes and rivers. 

[tooironic]

Bough - pronounced baʊ - meaning a major branch of a tree (as opposed to just a twig).

[geraldc]

My generation everyone knows the word "bough", but unless you're a gardener or into trees, rarely use it.

 

The reason why everyone knows the word is this:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock-a-bye_Baby

 

A cautionary tale about why trees are not a suitable substitute for proper childcare arrangements.

[Shelley]

Bough - This one is known by kids . Verse one of a popular nursery rhyme.

 

Hush-a-by baby

On the tree top,

When the wind blows

The cradle will rock.

When the bough breaks,

The cradle will fall,

And down will fall baby Cradle and all.    

[Guest realmayo]

I was taught "cracks carry, boughs break" by my grandfather but that gets no results on google.

 

lit: don't necessarily worry if the beam holding up your house has a crack

fig: (obvs)