40 Brilliant ‘B’ Words
If you had to take a guess at the 10 least-used letters of the English alphabet, chances are you wouldn’t rank B down among the Zs, Qs, Xs, and Js. And on the one hand, you’d be quite right—nearly 5% of all the words in a dictionary are listed under the second letter of the alphabet. But when B isn’t the first letter of a word, it’s actually quite rare: take an average page of written English text, and you can expect it to account for less than 1.5% of it, making B the seventh least-used English letter overall. So why not give B a boost with these brilliantly bizarre words?
1. BABBITTISM
Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis’s controversial 1922 satire Babbitt tells the story of fictional Midwest businessman George F. Babbitt, who achieves the perfect American middle-class life but soon finds total conformity and 8. BAHUVRIHI
In linguistics, a bahuvrihi is essentially a compound word in which the first part (A) describes the second (B), so that, according to Merriam-Webster, the entire word (A + B) fits the template “a B that is A.” Words like highbrow, white-collar, Bluebeard, Bigfoot, and sabretoothare all examples, as is the word bahuvrihi itself: it literally means “much rice” in Sanskrit, but is used as a nickname for a notably wealthy man.
9. BAISEMAIN
That courtly display of kissing someone’s hand on meeting them is called a baisemain.
10. BALATROON
A 17th-century word—derived from the Latin for “to prattle”—for a foolish or nonsensical person.
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