ThumbyĪ word from the early 1900s used to describe either a clumsy person or something that has been marked with grubby finger prints. ThrooshĪn old Scots dialect word meaning “to play truant.” A truant himself or herself would be a throosh-the-school. ThroatleĪn old Scots dialect word, probably combining throat and throttle to mean “to swallow.” 18. ThokyĪ thoke is a lie-in or a nap, so if you’re thoky then you’re sluggish or idle. The verb thesaurize relates back to this literal meaning of thesaurus, and means “to hoard treasure.” 16.
Thesaurus literally means “treasury” or “horde,” and in archaeological contexts the word is still sometimes used to refer to the part of an ancient building or temple where its treasures were kept. ThalerophagousĪn adjective describing anything or anyone who feeds predominantly on fresh veggies. A thalassocrat, ultimately, is someone who has precisely that power. Thalassocracy is the rule of the sea, used either in a political sense referring to which countries and which rulers have the rights to which areas of water, or in a figurative or mythological sense referring to gods or legendary rulers of the sea itself. The Latin word for your back, tergum, is the origin of a handful of rare English words, including the verb tergiversate, meaning “ to turn your back on something,” or “to desert your duties.” Likewise if you’re tergiversant, then you’re acting shiftily or evasively-in other words, you look like you’re about to tergiversate. Octopus, squid, and cuttlefish are all tentaculiferous-as they all have tentacles. TelewagĪn old English dialect word for a telegram. Tea-BoardyĪn old slang word describing a painting or artwork of poor quality. Likewise, a taurobole is a bull-killer, a tauroboly is the ritual sacrifice of a bull, anything tauricornous has horns like a bull, and anything tauriform is shaped like a bull. To hesitate in recognizing someone is to tartle. TarrybangleĪn old Scots word-originally used in reference to a game of marbles-for a shot in which a player bends down and hurls the ball from between their legs. Tantra-BobusĪn old English dialect word for a noisy, playful child. Tadly-OodlyĪn old Cornish word meaning “slightly drunk.” 4. TachythanatousĪn old medical term describing anything that kills quickly, such as venom or poison, Come across anything tachythanatous, and you’ll likely need a tachyiater-a medication or medical practitioner that heals quickly. In the 17th century, there was also an expression tace is Latin for candle-which isn’t true, but the phrase was used to mean “keep what we’re talking about secret.” How the phrase came about is unclear, but one theory is that because the candle represents light, keeping something tace means keeping it “in the dark” another theory claims that throwing a candle onto a theatrical stage was once used as a signal to stop the show and close the curtain immediately. Tace (pronounced “ tay-see”) means “ be silent” in Latin, but is used in English both as a verb and as an exclamation used to silence someone. Thanks to its appearance in a number of high-frequency words like the, this, that, then, and to, you can expect as much as 16 percent of all the words on any page of English text to be T-words, while around one in every 20 of the words in a standard dictionary will be listed under T-including the 40 terrific T-words below. T is now one of the English language’s most frequently used letters, and on average it will account for just under 10 percent of all the language you’ll use. And it’s from tau, via Latin, that T has ended up in English. Over time, this X steadily straightened, becoming more of a + shape, before the Ancient Greeks knocked the top off to create their T-shaped letter tau. Its earliest ancestor was probably an X-shaped Egyptian hieroglyph, which in turn became the X-shaped Phoenician letter taw. As odd as it might sound, the letter T was originally X-shaped.
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