Dear friends,

Welcome to what is now the traditional December edition of Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things! 

Here are eleven of the words I saved this past year using the Hypothes.is annotation tool (if you, too, would like to hunt example sentences in the wild for display at Wordnik, follow the instructions here). If that sounds like too much work, but you use the Libby e-reader and want to share sentences from books with Wordnik, just reply and I’ll get you set up. :) [Note: the month is the month I saved them, not the date they were originally published.]

January: “He believed that art should always ask questions - referring to his work as 'scul?ture'.”

February: “The neologism ‘necrosecurity’ describes the cultural idea that mass death among less grievable subjects plays an essential role in maintaining social welfare and public order.”

March: “For example, cattle were still widely acclaimed in their society, and one way we map just how much power or influence a person might have had is by the number of bucrania they are buried with (bucrania are the top of the cow’s skull with the horns still attached).”

April: “The researchers, who published details of the technique in Science Advances on 18 April1, call the otherwise imperceptible colour ‘olo’.”

May: “Sycophancy, also called glazing, occurs when a large language model learns to align its responses excessively with the user's point of view, even when that standpoint is objectively false, unethical, or harmful.”

June: “As these fruits rotted and partially split on the ground, they exposed substrate projections—crystalized sugars and protruding flesh—which served as bases for towers as well as for a large number of worms individually lifting their bodies to wave in the air (nictation).”

July: “Sportification means to either: (a) view, organize, or regulate a non-sport activity in such a way that it resembles a sport and allows a fair, pleasurable, and safe environment for individuals to compete and cooperate, and compare their performances to each other, and future and past performances; or (b) add a sport component to an existing activity in order to make it more attractive to its audiences.”

August: “There’s a name for this style of redistricting: a “dummymander,” where maps are drawn to so much partisan advantage that it leaves incumbents of the majority party vulnerable in the event of a major swing.”

September: “Thermochauvinism is the (often unconscious) assumption that it’s reasonable to live in cold places but unreasonable to live in hot ones.”

October: “An arrest of a person due entirely to the person having dark skin color is now known across the country as a "Kavanaugh stop," based on Justice Kavanaugh's justification of the practice.”

November: “We now have a fancy word, “heteropessimism,” to describe the outlook of straight women fed up with the mating behavior of men.”

If you want to see more words with recent examples, a selection is added more-or-less weekly to this Wordnik word list.

Some other December traditions: the Said the Gramophone Best Songs of 2025, reading (or listening to!) The Dark is Rising on December 20, and klatkager.

And lastly, if there’s someone on your list who is impossible to get a gift for, you can always adopt a word in their honor (and support Wordnik’s nonprofit mission)!

Stay well!

Your friend,

Erin