A good game one can play with oneself is to look at new words that crop up here and there and try to figure out what they mean, before consulting the dictionary..

A “tool kit” of basic Greek and Latin roots will take you a long way along the path of making friends with oddities such as acromegaly and vadose.

How about proscenium? When I first ran into this utterly mysterious word in high school, I could not imagine what it might mean, nor that any normal person could pronounce it or understand it, still less ever find a use for it.

The dictionary, of course, was at hand. Its reason for...