Words that you know that make you feel all clever

[Nefertiti2]

And Jeremy Hunt

[3 Colours Red]

And rhotacism beginning with an 'R'.

[WOM]

And lisp having an 's'.

[Bored Of Education]

Also, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which is the fear of long words. Whoever named that disorder must have been a real arse mustn't he?

Akin to dyslexia being hard to speak.

[Ginger Yellow]

Sesquipedalian - because brevity is preferable as a rule, as such NS can figure out the definition through opposites.

This one is my favourite word. Partly because it is so mellifluous, and partly because it is autological - it describes itself.

[Jah Womble]

In that instance, you're not so much 'misled' as completely in the dark.

[Paul S]

Obfuscation

If you don't know what the above word means, then that is a very good definition of it, because it means to deliberately mislead.

[Balderdasha]

Another Baader-Meinhof moment for me. I had to look up comorbidity the other day. I thought it meant something like 'increasingly likely to lead to death', but the actual meaning 'presence of one or more conditions in addition to your primary condition' is less scary.

[Hot Pepsi]

Comorbidity

[Mr Cogito]

Bailiwick. I use it all the time. And some say that Tom Clancy couldn't write literature.

Bailiwick - as uttered in Deadwood the movie, in a pleasingly serendipitous and timely way.

[3 Colours Red]

There's also a noun, rhoticity.

Not to be confused with rhotacism, which is pretty much the opposite.

Abugida is another one from the field of linguistics I like to throw in occasionally - "a writing system which is between syllabic and alphabetic scripts" i.e. each glyph represents a consonant and a vowel paired.

[Sporting]

Schwa is always a good one to throw in.

[Furtho]

Another word I learned via OTF is rhotic: "Relating to or denoting a dialect or variety of English (e.g. in most of the US and south-western England) in which r is pronounced before a consonant (as in "hard") and at the ends of words (as in "far")". There's also a noun, rhoticity.

[Guy Profumo]

Speaking of petrichor, is there an equivalent word for how vibrant colours look when the Sun comes out after the rain?

[Felicity, I guess so]

I have a crossover with an ear worm, in that I learned the word jejune in an English seminar about the same time I 1st heard Spandau Ballet’s “To Cut a Long Story Short” and it rhymes with the 1st line’s ‘lune/lagoon’ and has stayed there ever since.

[Furtho]

Mammiferous is a much nicer description than saying "He/She's got big tits."

On a somewhat similar note, OTF taught me "callipygian". It might even have been Toby G.

[Patrick Thistle]

Someone was being a show off and asked if anyone knew what Quartodecimenism is. And I did, thanks to my normally useless Bachelor of Divinity (Hons)

[Nurse Duckett]

Is it not the opposite? The smell of the ground when it rains following a dry spell?

Er, "antonym" - the opposite of a word... Thanks, good spot.

[Eggchaser]

Moiety.

moiety
/ˈmɔɪɪti/
noun
FORMAL•TECHNICAL

1. each of two parts into which a thing is or can be divided.
   "the tax was to be delivered in two moieties"
   • ANTHROPOLOGY
     each of two social or ritual groups into which a people is divided, especially among Australian Aborigines and some North American Indians.
   • a part or portion, especially a lesser share.

Usually seen by me in older wills, relating to the split of the residuary estate, often with one moiety going on trust.

[hobbes]

We did, though it was only resurrected after the German word became so popular over here.

That has quite made my day.

[Snake Plissken]

Sorry. I hef a keld.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

Mrs. S gets pissed off if I use words like these; she says I'm being an intellectual snob. I left school at sixteen.

Even though they don't really qualify for this thread, I enjoy using suboptimal, oxymoron, tautology and counterintuitive.

I just used two of those in a conference call.

Snake's wrong by the way - it's pronounced 'bailiwick'.

[G-Man]

Epicaricacy - the delight in the misfortune of others.

Why use a difficult Latin-type word when here's a perfectly good and pronouncable English one in "Schadenfreude".

[Duncan Gardner]

I've come up with a foolproof fundraising scheme.

Fines for all messaging narrative memes

[Jah Womble]

In college days, I went out with a girl who used that word all the bloody time. Like we needed reminding that we hadn't any money.