Hobbit Vocabulary
 

I've recently re-read "The Hobbit" (it's one of my favorite books).
Every once in a while I came to a word that I did not know the meaning.

Here is my list of words from "The Hobbit" that I did not know:

Prosy
- Dull; commonplace - arousing no interest, attention, curiosity or excitement.

Porter
- A dark beer resembling light stout, made from malt browned or charred by drying at a high temperature.

Bewuthered
- Appears to be a word unique to "The Hobbit". It's context would suggest it is synonymous with "Bewildered".

Palpitating
- To pulsate with unusual rapidity from exertion, emotion, disease, etc.; flutter: His heart palpitated wildly.

Flummoxed
- Confused; Perplexed

Bracken
- Type of fern or an area overgrown with ferns and shrubs.

Eyrie
- The nest of a bird, such as an eagle, built on a cliff or other high place.

Tuppence
- A very small amount.

Attercop
- A type of spider or a peevish, ill-natured person.

Tomnoddy
- A fool or a dunce.

Slowcoach
- Someone who moves slowly; a "slowpoke"

Turnkey
- A person who has charge of the keys of a prison; jailer.

Solemnities
- State or character of being solemn; earnestness; gravity; impressiveness: the solemnity of a state funeral.

Mattocks
- A digging tool with a flat blade set at right angles to the handle that can also be used as a weapon.

reading is the surest way to a large vocabulary. And Tolkien was a master language monger.

i enjoyed the books as well as the movies - i know you can't put everything into the movies though.

most of those are actual words. a few are particular to the shire

I liked the term 'second breakfast'. and elevenses, although again, I believe that's a term in common usage. I know some members of my family use it.

I should discover if a Spanish translation renders "second breakfast" as "desaydos."

How about Mathom, farthing, nob, and thain?

Clockwork Orange has some great words too; like "bezoomy" ...

There's even a glossary at the back of the book. Many of the words are bastardized Russian.

Yeah, it's like a Russian/cockney/gypsy creole slang.

Real horrorshow.

:::tolchoks your gulliver:::

I enjoyed all the books and am a big fan of LotR universe and I too enjoyed the buckets of new vocabulary dumped on me at the age of 13.

I just noticed your signature, freshness. I like that.

Reminds me of the Simpsons:

"Marge, there's the truth :headshake, and there's the truth :)"

Yup - many of them are in regular usage in the UK still.

I can buy porter less than a minute's walk from my flat. It is a specialist off licence though. Link to the incomparable The Offie.

Btw tuppence for is simply a way of saying two pence, so it has a literal meaning, rather than just a small amount.

I agree with Cloud though, nothing like a book to broaden your vocabulary.

Compliments of zippy, he suggested it.

Porter is available in the US, but varies in quality. Penn Brewing makes a Pennsylvania Porter (not round enough flavor) and Yuengling has a passable Porter, but it's not as easy to find as their Black and Tan (which bears no relation to a real Black and Tan).

I actually tend to prefer the Samuel Smith's Taddy (Tadcaster) Porter, which should be a lot easier for Sundae to get, since she's closer to Yorkshire than I am. Their Nut Brown Ale, by the way, is exactly as delightful and satisfying as James Herriott led you to believe.

Love Sam Smith's nut brown ale.

Uh-huh, just as I suspected all along.





:p

beer nuts!

I'm a lifelong reader and my vocabulary is pretty big, and I love words, so I'm always excited now when I read something that has unfamiliar words.

some other works I found which increased my vocabulary:

The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes;

Ficciones (in translation) by Jorge Luis Borges.

The Hobbit. One of the best stories ever written.

LOTR was better, though.

OMG! Something we agree on! Let's just set aside the fact that there's millions of other readers and literary critics also agree. :)

kind of a tangent...
 

I know many words, that I've picked up from books, that I will never use in an actual conversation because I don't know how they're pronounced, and I don't want to embarass myself. However, I will use them in typed communication, like here.

know how to pronouce "dictionary"?

Okay, okay, I know what you mean. Like the word, "dour." You'd think it would rhyme with sour, but it actually sounds like "do-er"

They occur to me as the context surfaces. I can't stop and open a new tab in real life.

open a tab? drinking your vocabulary, are you?

:D

I was thinking more like an actual book, you know. And if you look it up once, you own it.

I would say dour like sour.

"dow-er expression" ...see, that's why I don't try to say shit.

But that's the correct pronunciation.

[struggle]Must not derail perfectly good thread with traditional anti-LOTR rant ...[/struggle]

Even if it's not for everybody, LOTR repays the mature reader, for here there are indeed "icy beauties which pierce the soul" as one reviewer (P.S. Beagle?) had it. My one regret over having finished LOTR at fifteen was that I had not waited until twenty-one. (So I do the best I can, reading it, getting older, rereading it, getting older still...)

Tolkien actually didn't coin very many words; he resurrected words long buried, buried with Old English. All his Dwarves had names -- of Norse elves yet -- lifted from old literature like the Eddas or Norse mythological tales. Even his wizard was so: Gandalf means magic-elf, and this was the name of a Norse dwarf. Even mathom, I think, is a lift from Old English. Thain is just a variant spelling of a word familiar to Shakespeareans -- from the Scottish play.

One of the two. Enroute to checking on that, I found that a venereal disease of horses is pronounced doo-reen, not dow-reen. And that the word is perhaps derived from the Arabic.

Our 9yo daughter reads 24/7. Her vocabulary is amazing. Her pronunciation is hysterical. We try not to laugh out loud as we work out which word she is using (not too hard as she has an amazing grasp of meaning and context, but canbe a challenge when you're getting to 4-syllable words and words of foreign origin). We could make a gameshow out of it, methinks.