Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Welcome back to my 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).

L, as you can likely imagine, is not nearly as hard as K. In fact, this was the easiest one in a long time.

I wrote “lull” for my last word, and then I got a pang of conscious as to whether it was the “same word,” according to my arbitrary standards, as “lullaby.” It’s not, but I thought of a bunch of alternatives, and the first one was “leek.”

That’s right, “llama” and “lama” are different words. Language is fun! Can’t believe I didn’t think to put “language.”

“Lilliputian” has three Ls in it, as I might have guessed, but I’ll get over it.

I thought of “leukemia” right after I thought of “leukocyte,” but I didn’t write it down. Leukemia and I are not friends.

Weird that I didn’t put down “little.” That’s like one of the top 5 L words, right up there with “lesbian.”

This week’s definition from American Heritage Dictionary:

lay ³ (lā)

n.

1. A narrative poem, such as one sung by medieval minstrels; a ballad.

2. A song; a tune.

[Middle English, from Old French lai.]