Select Page

Using this whimsical, multi-colored Y-alphabet letter encouraged me to find whimsical, multi-colored, or at least unusual words. How ’bout these from some of the sources I’ve used in the A-Z blog challenge?

Yirn v. “To whine; to pout, or show petulance by facial grimaces. Pronounced the same as yearn. ‘My husband is an idealist; he’s always yirning for something.'”—The Superior Person’s Book of Words by Peter Bowler

Ylem n. The primordial substance from which all the elements in the universe were supposed by early philosophers to have been formed. Thought by the ancients to have been water, by the moderns to be hydrogen, and by the Chinese to be monosodium glutamate.”—The Superior Person’s Book of Words

Yarwhelp n. the bartailed godwit—Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary by Josefa Heifetz Byrne

Yex n. hiccup—Mrs. Bryne’s Dictionary

Yahoo. n. “There’s a good deal of the yahoo in every gang of adolescents that goes berserk, whatever their color…In Dean Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the Yahoos are a tribe of brutes having human form and embodying all the vices of mankind.”—I Always Look Up the Word Egregious by Maxwell Nurnberg

Yorgan n. a Turkish quilt; yaffle v. to eat and drink, especially noisily and greedily; yava n. an alcoholic drink made from the roots of the Polynesian shrub Piper methysticum—Foyle’s Philavery by Christopher Foyle

Demonstrating that word excavations have a practical application, I will now yaffle a yogurt while seated on a yorgan with nary a yex of satisfaction.