As I have told you before, if you were paying attention, I have a number of esoteric and/or bizarre dictionaries that I love to browse. If you have others that I haven't heard of, please let me know.

Here's my list (after re-charging):

Landmarks, by Robert Macfarlane. I told you about this one some time in the fall. It's a field guide to the British landscape but the part of it that I love best, parts, I should say, are the Glossaries, with the magical (esoteric0 local language. Eleven in all, but the tenth one is blank, for "future place-words and the reader's own terms."

I have a few in there; ice-worms (Bill's expression); darkness melts (a child's explanation of morning light); shit-brindle (I don't like brown); scunge (my father's expression); noodle ( I think mine); jolly (my father's again, his version of a tschotschke).

They Have a Word For It: A Light-Hearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases by (that is, gathered together by) Howard Rheingold. One of my favourites is lagniappe. You can look it up.

The Book of Jargon: An Essential Guide to the Inside Languages of Today, by (com[iled by)Don Ethan Miller. There's all kinds of different categories, but I couldn't find zamboni.

Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual Obscure, and Preposterous Words, by Josefa Heifetz Byrne. My favourite. She doesn't have huddle, though, or hirple. [Note: my stupid auto-check keeps trying to put an h on that first word instead of a g. I hate it when something corrects me incorrectly.] She does have sloom (to doze, to become weak, to decay, dog move sluggishly, to drift. sloomy, adj. And I like thirl: to pierce or perforate, to make vibrate, to enslave . adj: gaunt, thin, shrivelled.

Shakespeare's Bawdy, by Eric Partridge.Everyoe should re-read this before they go to Stratford.

More to come - not sure when.....

I have a few words to look up, culled from various bits of paper. I use the online dictionary, as I'm sure you do - The Oxford English Dictionary (OED for short) - and it's pretty good. But I love esoteric words so I have a number of esoteric dictionaries that I love to browse through. I'll haul them out and list them, after I go through my present backlog of words:

That is, AFTER I re-charge. A bientôt...

phenotype noun, Biology, the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment. DERIVATIVES phenotypic adjective, phenotypical, adjective,phenotypically, adverb ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from German Phaenotypus I don't know where I picked this one up.

bricolage noun, [ mass noun), something constructed or created from a diverse range of things. bricolages of painted junk. ORIGIN French.in art or literature) construction or creation from a diverse range of available things. the chaotic 2 Linguistics a group of languages related to each other less closely than those forming a family, especially one in which the relationships are unclear. ORIGIN late 19th cent.: modern Latin from Greek, phulon ‘race’.phylum

phylum noun, 1 Zoology a principal taxonomic category that ranks above class and below kingdom, equivalent to the division in botany. 2 Linguistics a group of languages related to each other less closely than those forming a family, especially one in which the relationships are unclear. ORIGIN late 19th cent.: modern Latin from Greek, phulon ‘race’.

taxonomy noun [ mass noun ] chiefly Biology the branch of science concerned with classification, especially of organisms; systematics.• the classification of something, especially organisms: the taxonomy of these fossils.• [ count noun ] a scheme of classification: a taxonomy of smells. DERIVATIVES adjective, taxonomical, adjective,taxonomically, adverb,taxonomist noun ORIGIN early 19th cent.: coined in French from Greek taxis ‘arrangement’ + -nomia ‘distribution’.

That's enough. I know I' m repeating words. Tomorrow I'll check the odd dictionaries.