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).

We’re in the middle of the alphabet now, and in a golden age as far as ease of word recall is concerned. I was nowhere close to done when I reached the end of the page. Our lexicon contains an embarrassment of M words.

Considering the way I work my way through these exercises, often riffing on phonetic similarities (hence the sequence “moor mull mule mute mutt”), it’s interesting to think of the words that get left out. Why “mound” but not “mountain?” Why “major” but not “minor?” They just never popped into my head before something else did.

I only indulged myself for brief stretches with the mis- and mono- prefixes, but I almost feel like I could do a full page of mono- words. Monophonic, monaural, monophthong, monorail, mononucleosis…

One word I forgot to mention? “Mention.” Inexplicable.

This week’s definition from American Heritage Dictionary:

mu·li·eb·ri·ty (my′lē-ĕbrĭ-tē)

n.

1. The state of being a woman.

2. Femininity.

[Latin muliebritās, state of womanhood (in contrast with maidenhood), from muliebris, womanly, from mulier, woman.]