Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Welcome back to my new weekly series, Vocab 128, in which I sit down with pen and paper and write 128 words beginning with the same letter, in more or less the order that I think of them, before scanning the page and posting it here. The result is a flex of my vocabulary muscles, an exposure of my handwriting to the world, and perhaps an insight into the psychology of my word associations.

Generally, I avoid words that are merely alternate forms of other words, and when I think of such a word I generally default to the appropriate noun form. Proper nouns I exclude as a rule (but we’ll see how that goes once I get to X).

(Watch out, there’s a very naughty word in this one)

You can get stuck on C really easily because there are three different initial sounds you can have with that letter. I think this might be the first one where I never made any spelling mistakes, however. Feel free to have it out over whether “concentric” and “center” are too much the same word to be allowed together.

This week’s definition from American Heritage Dictionary:

col·loid (kŏloid′)

n.

1. Chemistry

a. A system in which finely divided particles, which are approximately 1 to 1,000 millimicrons in size, are dispersed within a continuous medium in a manner that prevents them from being filtered easily or settled rapidly.

b. The particulate matter so dispersed.

2. The gelatinous stored secretion of the thyroid gland, consisting mainly of thyroglobulin.

3. Gelatinous material resulting from degeneration in diseased tissue.

adj.

Of, relating to, containing, or having the nature of a colloid.