rare, obc. (12. 861)

Futility Closet directs our attention to a volume first published in 1974, with multiple reprintings over the decades of some eighty thousand entries of preposterous and over-specialised English nonce words—though uncommonly, sometimes only once (see above) glossed in accessible corpora, that is at least outside the fandom of committed logophilia—compiled single-handedly by one Josefa Heifetz Byrne. The author was also a renowned concert pianist, taking her married name from her husband Robert Byrne, an expert pool player and instructor of billiards as well as a prolific humour columnist and civil engineer.  The book covers some of our old favourites, like ucalegon and anatiferous (an arguably useless word), as well as a treasury of terms new to us like foraminous, full of holes (see previously here and here), the Scots word groak for to look fixed at a party eating in anticipation of receiving food, anemocracy, a metaphorical term for governed by the changing winds and quaquaversal, going off in all directions. Click through at the link up top to check out a copy from the Internet Archive and adopt something you see that needs returning to common-parlance.