Joyfully Retired

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly feature sponsored by Kathy at Bermuda Onion’s Weblog.

On Monday I read a great short story, The Ushuaia Rabbit. It was a fun story but I had to pull up my laptop’s dictionary to check out quite a few words.

The Ushuaia rabbit is not actually a lagomorph, much less a leporid.

1. Lagomorph refers to an order of mammals that comprises the hares, rabbits, and pikas. They are distinguished by the possession of double incisor teeth, and were formerly placed with the rodents.

2. Leporid: There is no dictionary listing for leporid but they do have leporine. It means of or resembling a hare or hares.

3. stentorious: On the eighth floor I was able to rid myself of that woman and her stentorious nightmare.

Stentorion refers to a person’s voice as being loud and powerful.

4. masticatory: Since it lacks a masticatory apparatus during the day, the most practical thing was to cut up the lights into little pieces and mix in some milk and chickpeas.

Masticatory comes from masticate, which means to chew.

5. polyhedrons: If one collects (in the spirit of play, naturally) these little green metallic polyhedrons in a sack and shakes them, they make a lovely sound, with a rather Caribbean rhythm.

Polyhedrons refers to a solid figure with many plane faces, typically more than six.

Thanks for stopping by to check out my new words for the week. Don’t forget to join Kathy, our pertinacious (holds firmly to a course of action) leader.