unencumbered numbered words

See I'm all about them words 

Over numbers, unencumbered numbered words 

Hundreds of pages, pages, pages for words 

More words than I had ever heard 

And I feel so alive 

Jason Mraz

 

 

besot   \bih-SAHT\  verb
1 : infatuate
2 : to make dull or stupid; especially : to muddle with drunkenness

The Story Behind the Word
Does the very sight of your darling leave you drunk with love this February? Consider yourself besotted. Our modern word "besot" developed from a combination of the prefix "be-" and "sot," a now obsolete word meaning "a habitual drunkard." "Sot" in turn comes from the Old English "sott," which was used as a noun meaning "fool" or "drunkard" and as a verb meaning "to stupefy." In its "infatuation" sense, "besot" is most often turned into a participial adjective, a role it is likely to play in literary musings on "besotted lovers." The first known use of "besotted" was in Sir Thomas North's 1580 translation of Plutarch's Lives, in which Antonius was described as "besotted by Cleopatra."

billet-doux  \bill-ee-DOO\  noun
: a love letter

The Story Behind the Word
The first recorded use of the French word "billet-doux" (literally, "sweet letter") in an English context occurs in John Dryden's 1673 play Marriage a-la-Mode. In the play, Dryden pokes fun at linguistic Francophiles in English society through the comic character Melanthe, who is described by her prospective lover Rodophil as follows: "No lady can be so curious of a new fashion as she is of a new French word; she's the very mint of the nation, and as fast as any bullion comes out of France, coins it immediately into our language." True to form, Melanthe describes Rodophil with the following words: "Let me die, but he's a fine man; he sings and dances en Francais and writes billets-doux to a miracle."

osculate  \AHSS-kyuh-layt\  verb
: kiss

The Story Behind the Word
"Osculate" comes from the Latin noun "osculum," meaning "kiss" or "little mouth." It was included in a dictionary of "hard" words in 1656, but we have no evidence that anyone actually used it until the 19th century (except for scientists who used it differently as a word for "contact"). Would any modern writer use "osculate"? Ben Macintyre did. In a May 2003 (London) Times piece entitled "Yes, It's True, I Kissed the Prime Minister's Wife," Macintyre wrote, "Assuming this must be someone I knew really quite well, I screeched 'How are you,' . . . and leant forward preparatory to giving her a chummy double-smacker . . . Perhaps being osculated by lunatics you have never seen before is one of the trials of being a Prime Minister's wife. She took it very well."

 

m-w.com :) ilove