Awesome Word Spotting: Sizzle

Crazy, amusing, and fascinating words are on display in Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea. It's actually a fun read for people like me who love words.

Reading that book reminds me to be on the look-out for underused words, the ones that seem to sparkle but aren't as famous or used as much these days.

Here are types of words to watch for:

• A word with meaning that can carry the weight of three or more words;
• Words with enjoyable or interesting connotations;
• Words with aesthetic value in a linguistic sense. To learn more, Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little by Christopher Johnson has a chapter or two on this.

I don't have the patience or interest to hunt for words in dictionaries, but I often end up grabbing a book to read. When I do that, I'll try to be attentive to any words that stand out. Then I'll share them here.

So, the one that I found today is "sizzle"! I haven't read or heard that word in a long time, yet I hear the sound of what it describes a few times a week. This word caught my eye in Unfashionable by Tullian Tchividjian, "... the sizzle of this world ..." (page 19).