Since we have a little boy in the house, we are currently overrun with alphabet books of the usual kind: “As is for apple” with the appropriate picture attached. All very short and concrete. Well there’s only so much that a logophile can take, and I’ve had enough. We need more abstraction and obfuscation in our alphabet lists. So I’m declaring a little series of contests. First up: adjectives. Give me your best list.
Here are the rules:
- English only.
- All the words in your list must be valid adjectives.
- Three syllables, minimum.
- No neologisms.
- No dictionary use (on your honor!)
- Beg, borrow, or steal your entry from anyone, and anyone else’s list.
- Multiple submissions accepted.
Post your list in the comments section, or on your own site with a trackback here. The list with the most obscure entries (as judged by me) wins. I’ll announce a winner in a separate post.
To get the ball rolling, here’s my list below:
- is for abstemeous.
- is for beautific.
- is for cephalous.
- is for deleterious.
- is for egregious.
- is for fatuous.
- is for garrulous.
- is for hephestian.
- is for isotonic.
- is for jungian.
- is for keretinous.
- is for laconic.
- is for munificent.
- is for nefarious.
- is for onerous.
- is for pusillanimous.
- is for querulous.
- is for restitutionary.
- is for sardonic.
- is for typological.
- is for ubiquitous.
- is for vascular.
- is for wesleyan.
- is for xenological.
- is for Yugoslovian.
- is for zephyrous.
This is fun for everyone, but the following are officially tagged:
My mom, Valerie’s uncle John, Josh Jones, and Mark at pseudopolymath.com The rest of you… tag at will.
neumatikos 
is for adventurous
is for breathtaking
is for calisthenics.
is for diluted
is for effervescent.
is for fantastical.
is for gigantic.
is for hermaphrodite.
is for irritable.
is for jealousy.
is for kryptonite (is this neo?).
is for langorious.
is for municipalities.
is for neurosys.
is for onomotopoeia.
is for plausability.
is for quintessential.
is for restitution.
is for salutations.
is for tyranny.
is for unbelievable.
is for vertical.
is for wayfaring.
is for xenophobic.
is for y…..
is for zoophobia.
Y gave me the hardest time.
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Obscure for those outside the nerd world:
Abstracted
Binary
Configured
Delegated
Encapsulated
Functional
Generalized
Hexadecimal
Inherited
Just-In-Time
Kerberos
Lazy-loaded
Multi-threaded
Normalized
Obfuscated
Polymorphic
Queued (pronounced with 3 syllables)
Recursive
Surrogate
Transactional
Utility
Virtual
White-boarded
eXtensible (hey, it works for XML)
Yieldable
Zero-to-many
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I say hyphenation is cheating 😀
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😀
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It seems there were only the two entrants. So who won? 😀
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