Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Welcome back to my weekly series, Vocab 128 103, in which I sit down with pen and paper and write 128 103 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’re coming down to the wire and I must confess, my standards are dropping rapidly).

The asterisk by “yuk” indicates how far I got before I sighed, opened up my AHD, and began transcribing words in the order I found them therein. Certainly many of the words that follow the asterisk are words that I know and ought to have thought up on my own, but alas. All I can say is alas.

I won’t say how much it hamstrung me that I ruled out including both “young” and “youth,” because if I did I would have to say “it didn’t make that big of a difference, it’s only one word.” But every word counts, you know? There just aren’t that many Y words, and while I left a few entries in the dictionary that might have arguably fit my criteria, after a while I just got sick of Y. There are a lot of fine words here, though.

I felt so proud of myself for remembering “ytterbium,” and then I panicked and thought the spelling might actually be “ytturbium.” Then when I opened up the dictionary, I discovered it was “ytterbium” all along. And I was reminded that yttrium also exists, so be ye not proud and all that.

You won’t find “yeet” in the dictionary (yet), but it’s only a matter of time.

This week’s definition from American Heritage Dictionary:

yo·del (yōdl)

v. yo·deled, yo·del·ing, yo·dels or yo·delled or yo·del·ling

v.intr.

To sing so that the voice fluctuates rapidly between the normal chest voice and a falsetto.

v.tr.

To sing (a song) by yodeling.

n.

A song or cry that is yodeled.

[German jodeln, from German dialectal jo, exclamation of delight, of imitative origin.]