alt Hacker NewsI'll contest a few of these, which I thought were good.
Breviary: this was, to me, known and not uncommon. It's widely known to Catholics, but also, if you have an interest in medieval art or books, you'd likely know it too. It was one of the main types of books before the invention of the printing press. Think of an image from an illuminated manuscript, 50% chance it's from one.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: it's not that you're expected to know the whole word, but they're looking for you to recognize components of it and infer the meaning from that. I knew sesquippedalian (sometimes jokingly used in "long word" contexts) so that was easy: but phobia is also easily identifiable, and hippo, from the latin root, I knew was not as obvious as the animal, but probably something like "large" (clue: the Hippodrome). So you could, even knowing only "phobia" and being able to guess "hippo", have a good basis for your choice.
Complacent and gauche: have heard both these uses, I think that's straightforwardly correct. If this was a dictionary that would, at worst, be the 2nd or 3rd definition. No complaints.
Source: I used to place in spelling bees and could've been a contender but I didn't have the discipline to study the dictionary for hours on the weekends, which is the next level.
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To me, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia feels less like vocabulary and more like trivia
> and hippo, from the latin root, I knew was not as obvious as the animal, but probably something like "large" (clue: the Hippodrome)
Well.. Hippos is greek for horse, and Hippopotamus is a "river horse". Same for Hippodrome, a course for horses. And in latin, hypo means small (and not large), as seen in e.g. hypoglycemia.
I was, as was gp, confused by “complacent” as I haven’t typically used it or thought of it to include a smugness and immediately went to the ol’ Google only to find that “smug” appears in Oxford Language’s* definition as well. The key though is “smug or uncritical”, so while smug may not be typical for some it does make sense now that I have that added knowledge.
And iirc “gauche” had more than just “socially awkward” in the correct answer but speeding through it again I didn’t get gauche as a word. That said, something gauche, to me, has always been something glaringly “not ok” in a social sense so again, that tracks. Oxford Language defines it as
> lacking ease or grace; unsophisticated and socially awkward.
Which is closer to the quiz’s definition and again, tracks with my internal thinking of the word’s use.
> Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
Was just plain fun - as soon as I saw the “fear of long words” I was like of course that’s it
*I mistakenly put “Merriam Webster” the first time around - while MW doesn’t include the word smug itself, the 1.b definition is simply “self-satisfied”
> So you could, even knowing only "phobia" and being able to guess "hippo", have a good basis for your choice.
Except "hippo-" is from Greek and means "horse".
For explicit comparison: kinetic and metamorphosis are ~10x as common as breviary, and 10,000x as common as hippo….
See NGRAMs: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Breviary%2CHip...
Ucalegon was perhaps the most ridiculous to me, much more a factor of your knowledge of classical literature than vocabulary.
I will say that breviary it showed up in "advanced" for me, and was one of only two words below "grandmaster" I missed. In the modern era it is jargon, it's just that the in group (practitioners of liturgical Christianity) are in the ballpark of a quarter of the English speaking world.
I'll remark that "if you have interest in [some particular academic pursuit], you'd likely know it" is a pretty decent description of the sort of word that shows up in "grandmaster" tier.
(I have joked that, living in Japan, my English is getting worse faster than my Japanese is getting better, but breviary might well be a concrete example.)