Your New English Words

[murrayspeaks]

People have displayed daedalian ingenuity in learning all those words

[lips]

ai

a three-toed sloth.

good for scrabble.

[crazy-meiguoren]

Lahar: (luh-HAR) a volcanic mudflow.  Added to my vocabulary on May 18, 1980, when a nearby mountain blew its top.

[Gharial]

omphaloskeptic ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/omphaloskeptic )

 

tergiversation ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tergiversation )

[imron]

brobdingnagian - huge; gigantic.

[889]

Formication: the sensation that ants are crawling on your skin

[roddy]

Pleonasm

[Lu]

47 minutes ago, roddy said:

Pleonasm

It's funny, I've known this word since forever... in Dutch (pleonasme). I think I learned it as a child, even before 中学. It barely registers as a difficult word for me. But now that I think of it, I don't think I've ever seen it in English, so it must be rare in that language. Funny how such things can vary.

[Shelley]

2 hours ago, roddy said:

Pleonasm

Having read the link, it strikes me that this word can be applied to chinese. So many words are pairs of characters or even 3 or 4, more commonly 2 to avoid confusion and ensure the meaning is transmitted even if the transmitting medium is not 100%.

 

From the wiki page:

"pleonasm can serve as a redundancy check: If a word is unknown, misunderstood, or misheard, or the medium of communication is poor—a wireless telephone connection or sloppy handwriting—pleonastic phrases can help ensure that the entire meaning gets across even if some of the words get lost."

 

I would definitely describe chinese as Pleonastic language.

[edelweis]

2 hours ago, Lu said:

I think I learned it as a child

Also a favorite word of French teachers.

Don't say "monter en haut" (go up upstairs), it's a terrible pléonasme.

(but most people say it anyway).

[imron]

3 hours ago, Lu said:

I don't think I've ever seen it in English

In English, this is typically called a tautology which from the linked definition, it seems that a pleonasm is slightly different from that in nuance.

[Geiko]

"Pleonasmo" is also a normal word in Spanish schools. I'd say that in Spanish 'tautology' is used in philosophy and logic discourse and has negative connotations, whereas 'pleonasm' is used in language classes, to describe unnecessary repetitions, but it's also a rhetoric figure in poetry, and then it's seen as a way to embellish a literary text. The meaning is essentially the same, but the words are used in different contexts. 

[imron]

sesquipedalian - given to using long words.

[Geiko]

Ultracrepidarian: noting or pertaining to a person who criticizes, judges, or gives advice outside the area of his or her expertise. 

[Guest realmayo]

22 hours ago, Geiko said:

Ultracrepidarian

My middle name ....!

[imron]

Panchreston

[roddy]

Limerence. Which I found odd as I couldn't see they etymology of it, but it turns out to have been coined in the 70s by... well, it's on the link. 

[Lu]

4 minutes ago, roddy said:

Limerence.

I came across this word some years ago, when the English Wikipedia lemma was linked with the Dutch one for 'Verliefdheid'. 'Verliefdheid' is now linked to 'Infatuation', but really it has components of both and there is no English term that covers it exactly. What I found interesting is that limerence was considered something somewhat unhealthy, an obsession that one should get over to have a normal relationship, while verliefdheid is considered almost a necessary condition for a romantic relationship: if you're not verliefd, then perhaps you shouldn't be with this person.

[murrayjames]

metastatic

adjectival form of metastasis

[roddy]

In mining, gangue (/ɡæŋ/)^[1] is the commercially worthless material that surrounds, or is closely mixed with, a wanted mineral in an ore deposit. It is thus distinct from overburden, which is the waste rock or materials overlying an ore or mineral body that are displaced during mining without being processed, and from tailings, which is rock already stripped of valuable minerals.

 

I could tell from context roughly what it was, but had to check to see it differs from tailings. And obviously you'll want to know where spoils fit in - spoils are the removed and dumped overburden. You're welcome.