Funny words that start with i
If you’re crazy about books, then you’re a bibliomaniac. A “very common” word in the 1500s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. BibacityĪ 17th-century word for “outrageous drinking.” 22. … while a belly-god or belly-slave is a particularly gluttonous person. In Tudor English, a grand feast or excellent food was belly-cheer … 20. Beef-WittedĪnother Shakespearean invention, meaning “foolish” or “slow-brained.” 19. Bed-SwerverĪ word for an unfaithful lover, invented by Shakespeare. Bauble-BearerĪ court jester-and so, figuratively, a foolish, empty-headed person.
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To battologize is to annoy someone by repeating the same thing over and over again.
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Other B fears include bathophobia (the fear of depth), belonephobia (needles), batrachophobia (reptiles), blennophobia (slime) and both bacteriophobia (the fear of bacteria), and bacillophobia (microbes). BathysiderodromophobiaĪ form of claustrophobia: If you don’t like traveling on underground rail systems, then you’re bathysiderodromophobic. This and bamblustercated are 19th century American slang words essentially meaning “stupefied,” “confounded,” or “embarrassed.” 14. The name first appeared in the language in 19th-century nautical slang in reference to the “Straits of Ballambangjang,” a fictitious sea strait in southeast Asia (based on the real-life seas off Balambangan island near Borneo) that sailors alleged to be “so narrow, and the rocks on each side so crowded with trees inhabited by monkeys, that the ship’s yards cannot be squared on account of the monkey’s tails getting jammed into and choking up the brace blocks.” 13. BallambangjangĪny fictitious or fantastic place-where a story that seems too good to be true might be supposed to have taken place-is a Ballambangjang. Pronounced “bal- byoosh-ee-ate,” incidentally, not “bal- byoot-ee-ate." 12. BalatroonĪ 17th-century word-derived from the Latin for “to prattle”-for a foolish or nonsensical person. That courtly display of kissing someone’s hand on meeting them is called a baisemain. In linguistics, a bahuvrihi is essentially a compound word in which the first part ( A) describes the second ( B), so that, according to Merriam-Webster, the entire word ( A + B) fits the template “a B that is A.” Words like highbrow, white-collar, Bluebeard, Bigfoot, and sabretooth are all examples, as is the word bahuvrihi itself: It literally means “much rice” in Sanskrit, but is used as a nickname for a notably wealthy man. BaggageryĪ 16th-century word for the hoi polloi or rabble. Baggage-SmasherĪs well as being a name for a thief who specializes in stealing luggage from trains, in 19th-century slang a baggage-smasher was a porter at a railway station. Jargon-filled talk that sets out to clarify something but ends up only confusing things? That’s bafflegab. It’s used in relation to someone going back on their word, after a deal has been struck. Backspangĭerived from spang, an old Scots word for a sudden jolt or kick, a backspang is essentially a sting in the tail-a bad turn of events or a sudden detrimental change of mind at the very last minute. Back-Doubleīecause it’s usually a less direct route, any side road or backstreet can also be called a back-double. Likewise, babblement or babblery is gossiping, prattling conversation, while a babble-merchant is an unstoppably talkative person. If you’re babblative, then you’re prone to babble or chatter. The novel inspired a handful of words that have since entered the language including Babbittism or Babbittry, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “materialistic complacency and unthinking conformity.” 2. Babbitt, who achieves the perfect American middle-class life but soon finds total conformity and social expectation oddly discomforting. Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis’s controversial 1922 satire Babbitt tells the story of fictional Midwest businessman George F.
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So why not give B a boost with these brilliantly bizarre words? 1. But when B isn’t the first letter of a word, it’s actually quite rare: Take an average page of written English text, and you can expect it to account for less than 1.5 percent of it, making B the seventh least-used English letter overall. And on the one hand, you’d be right-nearly 5 percent of all the words in a dictionary are listed under the second letter of the alphabet. If you had to take a guess at the 10 least-used letters of the English alphabet, chances are you wouldn’t rank B down among the Zs, Qs, Xs, and Js.