I learned this word from playing Age of Empires III back in 2007
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Every rare word has a story behind it. A grandmother’s saying, a sailor’s slang, a hometown word the rest of the world forgot. Here’s how OUTLIER players know the words they find.
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I ate it.
Reading about the collapse of traditional Tamil fisheries.
Alternate form of chaos. I was just guessing.
I remember reading this in "A Swiftly Tilting Planet," one of the sequels to "A Wrinkle in Time."
Encountered Obelia as a fascinating little marine hydroid. I like to paraphrase Hamlet, "the fair Obelia". Also remember Little Obelia as a gum-nut baby from May Gibbs’ Snugglepot and Cuddlepie books.
I heard Harvey Korman’s character in “Blazing Saddles” say, “Gentlemen, please, rest your sphincters!”
So I tried Hurlocks first, and then Genlocks, imagine my surprise when I found it WAS a word, and not just for Darkspawn.
This is another word from my childhood, Mither/ mithering/ mithered/ mithers. It meant to bother someone or sort of mutter/ sniffle to yourself. It was something you would say to a child. "Stop your mithering"
My grandmother always liked casaba melons, and I thought it was a common term. Imagine my surprise when it was my first Pioneer find!
Once you've seen this word - and the cute spiky animal it represents - it's hard to forget. To be clear though, have not had the privilege of seeing an echidna in the real world. But I've met it in books.
I knew the word before this, but it popped into my head because I was recently watching the TV show Severance, and there's a scene where a character calls another a "feculent moppet." Man, what an all-time insult.
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An old friend of mine, with many and varied interests, got me to take him fossil-hunting a few times (I had the car), and we often found the bullet-shaped belemnites.
I know this word only thanks to Armando Ianucci's "The Death of Stalin". Quorate is used in the first meeting of the Politburo after Stalin's death when everyone is trying their best to overcome their terror of Beria by making minor procedural points!
From my anatomy class in undergrad. It's the pointed end of your breastbone.
While I may not have it, I've heard of it before, and why microphilia isn't here, well it's quite a sore.
Egg have yolk
I'm a chorister myself - I think that's why this word stuck in my head when I first read it.
I just finished reading a book called "The End of Drum Time" about the Sami people of Norway, Finland, and Sweden. Yoiking is a traditional style of vocalization that evokes or calls up the essence of a person or thing. At least that's my limited understanding.
I recently read Lolita and boy does H.H. have a huge vocabulary, with some of the words being ... creepy. This is one of the creepy ones. Seared into my brain forevermore.
I was watching Taskmaster and the tall British man called spit "flob" and I threw that at the Outlier wall hoping it would stick. Turns out, it did!
I wrote a short story involving the moon turning into a shark, and a proofreader used this word to describe the bad science of my writing. I went, "Oh that'll score well in Outlier" and here we are!
In minature painting, if you prime a miniature with black and then hit it from above with white, that's considered a zenithal highlight, so that's how I learned this one. I assume it has more interesting definitions outside of this context that I do not know.
I cheated one day and looked at the top scoreboard of someone else and went, "wait how is this a word? It's just an alternate spelling this is stupid" then abused my newfound knowledge for high points.
I think I first encountered HUMIDORS in online vintage shops and second hand shops as it is a furniture piece meant to store cigars and keep them fresh and moist. Especially for high end or rare cigar varieties like Cubans.
I was thinking of Downey Woodpeckers. I discovered it has an alternative meaning which is negative, but I'll keep focused on the birds.
Living near Washington, DC I encounter honeycombing construction regular in the Metro station vaulting.
Most of the episode titles in the Ace Attorney games include this word. —🐦🔥✍️
I was given a crash course in viscosity by our chemist at work before he left. This is one of the few fancy terms i remember. Our viscometer measures in centipoise
I took death metal lessons with a vocal coach and learned a great deal of anatomy in the throat. This word features heavily in the harsh vocals scene. This type of scream is popular in deathcore and brutal death metal.
I work in a screen printing factory and we have a small flexo department. Im fairly versed in that printing process, though ive not personally run a press.
Playing Hades and came across 'cthonic' which I knew from studying classics. I looked it up to see if I recalled the meaning right and since I have poor eyesight + mild dyslexia, I wrote it down incorrectly. Another instance of typoing my way into learning a whole new word 😂
Doing Outlier for long enough has taught me to use common prefixes and suffixes to create words that I didn’t even know existed before. As long as I know the pieces, I can invent words from them.
This is not a word I use. I was thinking "insatiable" and wrote the wrong one.
SOOP, soup
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I credit this one to the Etrian Odyssey video game series. Great games. Not sure why Atlus doesn't want to actually sell them.
During hyper specific research about banned books in the 1920s, I found one in the Oxford's Phi collection called Satyra Sotadica de arcanis de Amoris et Veneris (Satire on the mysteries of love & Venus) Fair warning- Sotadica is after Sotades, a poet known for X-rated satire 🔞📚
I have the condition😤
I encountered affixes in general in a university course in Historical Linguistics way back in the long-ago. Fun fact, English has many prefixes and suffixes, but our only common infix is the F word. In-f'ing-credible.
🦆🦆🦆
i am a German speaker and also a librarian, so i know how it refers to a roof and also a type of book page.
It's in a song called King of Spain. The singer says "Once I was the King of Spain, now I eat humble pie." One of the fancy things he used to do is play Crokinole.
The works of Olivier Messiaen.
I encountered the word “bucentaur” in a book about painters in Venice. I looked it up because it seemed cool that it combined ideas with boats with ideas of mythology, also, that it was a word chosen to associate with the ruling families of the time.
USA player, obviously. Things are bad.
Christopher Marlowe had this unfinished epillion ‘Hero & Leander.’ As a child I thought the line was /as she went, would cheer up through the bills/ I imagined this aquatic superhero (fully kitted out: Cape, tights, undies on the outside) being so happy she could pay her bills.
I read it in one of Shakespeare’s plays
Please take a minute to look at a picture; these are truly the creature of all time
Remembered from all the times Dr House's entourage suggested that it could be sarcoidosis (or lupus).
A serendipitous discovery when browsing the dictionary for interesting words (what? doesn't everyone do that?) which I remembered because I get the mirligoes frequently when I stand up.