r/words

Hi, I made this one. I've played Wordle-likes for years and always wanted to build my own, but I never had an idea that felt like mine.

The push came from a strange place. Half of what I read these days is written by AI, and it's never short. Every email, every doc, twelve words where five would do. At some point I said the phrase out loud, long story short, and realised it was a game.

So: you get a twelve-word sentence. You rephrase it in exactly five of its own words. Real English, same meaning, your job is to work out which words carry the sentence and which are just dressed up to look important. Scoring is Wordle style, blue for right word in the right spot, orange for in the answer but elsewhere, grey for out. Five tries, one sentence a day.

My wife and my brother were the playtesters. An early version let "the" beat proper words in the answer, which felt awful to lose to, so the answers now always favour the concrete word. That one change ate a whole weekend.

I think Cloaca and Rosacea would be beautiful names for a girl.

Edit: Honorable mentions for Candida, Hernia, Kosher, and Liaise.

edit 2: This was sparked after watching this season of Married at First Sight, where one of the women's mothers was named Violence ✨

You can instantly age yourself by saying words like or "dope", "sick", "rad" and my students mock me for saying "wicked" (while I mock them for saying "sigma"). However, everyone from boomers to alphas can say "cool" and it sounds...cool.

Wiki suggests "platform decay" but that seems more specific to software rather than an overarching theme of diminishing quality.

Edited to provide context: I think it's an important concept when discussing disposable culture and its various issues with my kids. Although I do swear around them, I don't like providing my kids with swearwords to use.

Versions that just replace "shit" with a synonym isn't really what I'm looking for, slop is probably the closest, although it doesn't really include the intention behind it is more than laziness. Deliberate obsolescence is close, too. But enshittification is just right, isn't it?

Unfazed - I often see this word get the red underline.

Okay I might just be really stupid but I’m a college student and a girl I’ve kind of gotten to know through my classes just asked me if I wanted to come to her tea party in her dorm after dinner.

Is “tea party” slang for something or is she genuinely asking me to a tea party? Am I just too dumb or sheltered??

UPDATE: It was an actual tea party. Like a group of us made tea in the communal kitchen and she brought cookies to bake. It was a great time.

A new word is needed.

Listen, I don't want to gatekeep people from consuming vegan things. But plant-based means nothing, and it's confusing. Because "based" to the average person implies additives could be non-plant and therefore animal. It's a useless word. "Plant-based" and vegan both can be diets. The term was needed bc of the schism between of moral absolutists who have a platonic-ideal relationship with the word vegan and their cultural counterparts who want to loosen the definition to just describe a an object of consumption and pattern of consumption.

And this simplistic semantic reason is where I the majority of disagreements within the body of "veganism" get confused and fall apart.

We can make new words. The word "vegan" was coined by members of the Vegetarian Society in 1944 as a quippier way to say "Strict Vegetarian." It was correct then to say that Vegans held Vegetarian beliefs, and it still arguably could be today.

So-called vegan beliefs/ philosophies are not monolithic. They are fractitous. People can choose to consume only vegan things for many valid reasons, often contradicting each other, and they could still be called "vegan". You can adhere to a vegan diet for all sorts of reasons-- e.g. love for animals, ethics, environmentalist, health, social-- mutally or exclusively-- and you are still vegan! You be a vegan and hate animals. You can be vegan because you hate animals. Vegan a bad descriptor belief/philosophical system.

In my opinion, vegan should refer to the product of consumption itself bc thats how it is most commonly understood. It is also the simplest, most recognizable definition: A object of consumption produced without animal products is vegan.

Ie, Jews and kosher. You wouldn't call a Jew "a kosher." You wouldn't even say a Jew "is kosher." You would say they "keep kosher" or "eats kosher" or "follows kashrut (rules about being kosher)."

I think I would like at least one new word for the affiliated group(s) of belief systems which has emerged to consume vegan things.

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Edit 19-8-2026: I retract my earlier statement. The confusion over the word vegan is probably where not the majority of the disagreements within veganism fall apart. This thread shows it's clearly the bad faith actors, vegan themselves, weaponizing the confusion about the word on whim to meet their fringe beliefs to bolster their ego. Thereby gaslighting people into believing vegan is some cult (with laws they just made up and secrets only they could know) which has no measurable basis or relation to material reality.

Which is exactly why we need a new word.

For my Natural History Museum (extended) caption,

I feel the former isn't quite right,
and the latter seems inappropriate for us bird lovers!

This can become a bit of a philosophical convo 😁 but me and my boyfriend were talking about what word we both feel is the best to represent the opposite of trauma.

I'm curious what others think- what word embodies the antithesis/opposite of "trauma" to you?

It lost its etymology.

I psyched you out!

Any suggestions for fun or useful words starting with these letters?

Here's the list with paraphrased definitions:

• Abject - extremely bad or without hope
• Abundance - plentifulness
• Aesthetic - concerning beauty
• Affinity - liking of something
• Anachronism - out of place in time
• Analemma - the path of a celestial body
• Anathema - a disgrace or abomination
• Antimetabole - repeating words in reverse
• Bricolage - creation from diverse sources
• Catharsis - emotional release
• Celestial - positioned in the sky
• Chiaroscuro - art technique of dark and light
• Cognoscenti - experts in a subject
• Continuum - noun form of continuous
• Crepuscular - relating to twilight (night)
• Defenestration - throwing out of a window
• Duplicity - deceitful, two-faced behavior
• Eclectic - derived from diverse sources
• Effervescent - vivacious and enthusiastic; fizzy
• Effusive - expressing unrestrained pleasure
• Ephemeral - fleeting and temporary
• Equanimity - mental calmness
• Esoteric - understood by few
• Ethereal - too perfect for this world
• Exquisite - extraordinarily fine
• Equanimity - mental calmness
• Frisson - a sudden feeling of thrill
• Imbue - permeate with a quality
• Incendiary - causing fire
• Indomitable - a will that can't be subdued
• Iniquitous - grossly unfair and wrong
• Innocuous - not harmful
• Insidious - subtly and cumulatively damaging
• Instantiation - representation by an instance
• Kenopsia - eeriness of abandoned places
• Laconic - using very few words
• Libertine - behaving without moral principles
• Liminal - transitional stage, at a boundary
• Melisma - singing a syllable with multiple notes
• Milieu - a person's social environment
• Mondegreen - misunderstood lyrics
• Nascent - emerging
• Neologism - a new term
• Obfuscate - render obscure
• Opulent - lavish
• Orthogonal - at a right angle
• Paradigm - typical example of something
• Pareidolia - a face seen in something inanimate
• Poignant - touching or moving with sadness
• Polyannish - excessively optimistic
• Prescient - knowledge before it happens
• Prognosticator - a prophet; predictor
• Prolific - producing much
• Prudent - showing care for the future
• Quixotic - exceedingly idealistic
• Sanguine - optimistic; blood-red
• Sangfroid - literally, cold-blooded
• Saudade - nostalgia for a new time or place
• Serotonin - a neurotransmitter for calmness
• Shambolic - chaotic and disorganized
• Soporific - tending to induce drowsiness
• Susurrus - whispering
• Synergy - combined effect of cooperation
• Syzygy - an alignment of celestial bodies
• Ubiquitous - present everywhere
• Undecuple - eleven times as much
• Verdant - very green
• Vorfreude - anticipated joy of future pleasures
• Zeitgeist - defining spirit of the times
• Zenith - the top or peak
• Zephyr - a gentle breeze (from the west)

Anybody know why we say the "y"? I don't think there's any other ?-u-k-e that has it.