Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Welcome back to my weekly series, Vocab 128 108, in which I sit down with pen and paper and write 128 108 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… ah, bloody hell).

So let’s start with the obvious: we did not get to 128 today. It isn’t that 128 distinct eligible X words do not exist. The list of X words I cribbed from (and yes, I cribbed this week something fierce) was in fact nearly 500 words long. But I could not use all of them, because many were obviously variants of one another, and that is even more against the rules than cribbing. Checking each word thoroughly would have been exhausting, so I did my best and then simply laid down my pen when I got to the end.

I managed to come up with a mere six words on my own before resorting to an external list. Of those six, I quickly recognized that I had misspelled both “xylem” and “xanthan.” So, off to a terrific start.

If I had really stretched myself, I could probably have come up with “xenon” and “Xhosa” on my own. “Xanadu” came to me early, and I did not write it down because it is mainly a proper noun, but I came to accept that it could be a common noun when used figuratively (but what a slippery slope that is). I had fully intended to write “x-ray” from the start and I just forgot about it for a while; “xenomorph” was not on the list, but there were enough words like it that I said, let’s go for it, have a little fun with this hot mess.

The vast majority of words on this list are Greek-derived scientific jargon with the prefixes “xantho-,” “xeno-,” “xero-,” and “xylo-” attached, which is as expected. I might have gone buck wild and just started tossing these prefixes onto whatever roots and suffixes came to mind, but there’s no telling what sort of abominations this may have produced.

Several of these words do not seem to have entries in the American Heritage Dictionary, even though they did have entries in Merriam-Webster, per the list I used, or dedicated articles on Wikipedia. What up with that, AHD? You’re getting quite shown up this time around. Granted, there do seem to be X words in the AHD that don’t seem to have been on the Merriam Webster list, but I have already scanned the paper and I am done with this business.

Here’s one that did, for this week’s definition:

xe·bec also ze·bec or ze·beck (zēbĕk′)

n.

A small three-masted Mediterranean vessel with both square and lateen sails.

[French chebec, probably from Catalan xabec, from Arabic šabbāk, from šabaka, to entwine, fasten; see śbk in the Appendix of Semitic roots.]