The 10 Words of the Week #7

To brighten your daily life and revive a few lost or seldom-spoken words, we offer you every Wednesday 10 rare or original words to use in your conversations. Ready to take up this week's challenge?

1. Feast : Verb. Colloquial. To enjoy a good meal; to particularly savour a meal. To delight in.

2. Amenity : Noun, feminine. Gentleness. The quality of that which is pleasant to see or smell.

3. Lie : Verb. To be lying, on the ground, stretched out.

4. Turpid : Adjective. Without morals. Of a contemptible morality. Infamous.

5. Hapax : Noun, masculine. A word that has appeared only once in the written records of humanity and whose meaning is often unknown to us. Example: A line by Mallarmé: "Sur les crédences, au salon vide : nul ptyx" (Mallarmé later explained that he invented the word "ptyx" because he was looking for a term ending in "-ix" that would not exist in any known language).

6. Lampadophore : Noun, masculine. A person who carried the lights in religious ceremonies.

7. Nitpicker : Noun, masculine. A pedantic or overly meticulous person.

8. Imperitia : Noun, feminine. A lack of knowledge. An inability to practise a profession due to ignorance of what one ought to know. Inaptitude.

9. Petrichor : Noun, masculine. "The smell of rain." The earthy scent that arises after rainfall. The term was coined in 1964 from the words "petra" (stone) and "ichor" (the fluid that was said to flow in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology).

10. Heuristic : Adjective. That which is useful to discovery.