Weirdest word you know in another language

[Ciarán12]

I've always thought that an interesting measure of how large your vocabulary in another language is is what the most random word you know in it is. It's not necessarily an accurate measure (you could learn a random word early on; for example, the first word I learned in Japanese was soroban - "abacus" which is pretty random), but it's always something I think about in each of the languages I learn.
This is a thread to list those deliciously random words you happen to know (whether or not they represent an accurate picture of the scope of your vocabulary) in all the languages your learning.

I'll start:

核分裂 [kakubunretsu] - nuclear fission
argamassa- grout, mortar

[linguoboy]

One of the very first words of Welsh I learned was sancteiddier, which is the impersonal imperative/subjunctive form of sancteiddio "to bless". It occurs in the Lord's Prayer.

[IpseDixit]

asphodel
halibut
thistledown
paean
gorse
kipper
liege
tine
monkshood

[vijayjohn]

In Malayalam, maybe [kʊn̪d̪əˈpɭeːjt] 'thingamajig'. I'm not even sure how to spell it in Malayalam. കുന്തപ്ലെയ്റ്റു? കുന്തപ്ലേറ്റു?

[Ciarán12]

asphodel
halibut
thistledown
paean
gorse
kipper
liege
tine
monkshood

Those are some very obscure words! Well done! I didn't even know most of them!

[vijayjohn]

asphodel
halibut
thistledown
paean
gorse
kipper
liege
tine
monkshood

Those are some very obscure words! Well done! I didn't even know most of them!

I've at least come across all of them except asphodel, thistledown, gorse, and monkshood. But yeah, Ipse kind of has a knack for finding obscure English words.

[Ciarán12]

asphodel
halibut
thistledown
paean
gorse
kipper
liege
tine
monkshood

Those are some very obscure words! Well done! I didn't even know most of them!

I've at least come across all of them except asphodel, thistledown, gorse, and monkshood. But yeah, Ipse kind of has a knack for finding obscure English words.

I knew gorse, kipper and liege, and I had heard of halibut but probably couldn't have told you what it was exactly, the rest are new to me.

[linguoboy]

Not bragging, but I knew them all. I suspect Ipse and I must have similar taste in literature. That's where I get most of my "weird words" from.

One of the rare exceptions is Muckefuck. That I learned orally.

[Ciarán12]

Not bragging, but I knew them all. I suspect Ipse and I must have similar taste in literature. That's where I get most of my "weird words" from.

I picked up argamassa reading Paulo Coelho I think. I'm reading a history of Brazil at the moment, there are a lot of odd historical terms in there that I had to look up. Whenever I come across a new word or phrase I don't know, I stick in a list which eventually gets fed into my Memrise course. I've a bit of a backlog to get through but once I get to the most recent entries I imagine I'll be updating that to something like "scurvy" or "flotilla".

[IpseDixit]

But yeah, Ipse kind of has a knack for finding obscure English words.

Haha, well actually more like the authors I read have a knack for putting obscure words in their books.

Not bragging, but I knew them all. I suspect Ipse and I must have similar taste in literature.

I think a good chunk of those words are from Ursula K. Le Guin's novels.

That's where I get most of my "weird words" from.

Yeah me too. That's why I, too, think that obscure words aren't necessarily a good indicator of how well you know a language, for example in my case, most of my English comes from books and I'm sure I'd have more problems with slang or colloquial phrases that aren't usually found in written texts.

Whenever I come across a new word or phrase I don't know, I stick in a list which eventually gets fed into my Memrise course.

I do that too, only not with memrise or the like (I got fed up with them), I just have a list on Microsoft Word, so far it is 52 pages long.

[linguoboy]

Words picked up today from the account of the Algerian War that's taken me forever to finish: bariolé "garishly-coloured", tortionnaire "torturer", flétri "withered", quille "demob".

It's been a long time since I made any flashcards or vocab lists to study from, but I always tried to avoid including anything too marginal. If I remember it, fine, but I'm not going to make any kind of effort.

[Vlürch]

For me knowing weird words is definitely not representative of my overall knowledge of languages, since I intentionally like to learn all kinds of more or less obscure terms and/or simply words for weird things that are totally useless when it comes to actually learning a language.

With English words, I'll only try to include ones whose meanings aren't obvious at first glance (except the second one, which is obvious but I just can't not post it):
prismatorhombated hecatonicosachoron
anthropophagolagnia
symphysy
extranoematic
abstersion
mysoped
coruscation
endysis
nymphectomy
saprophyte
xenography
synderesis
undinism
epithelium

Most of the weird Japanese words I know aren't really all that weird, just unlikely to be encountered randomly. Some of these are almost definitely more common than I think, actually, but whatever:
砉 (kaku/keki/kyaku) - the sound of skin and bone separating
奇岩 (kigan) - unusually shaped rock
宮刑 (kyūkei) - castration as a punishment
死色 (shishoku) - deathly complexion
屍姦 (shikan) - necrophilia
劫 (kō) - aeon
神化 (shinka) - apotheosis
夭逝 (yōsei) - premature death
水子 (mizuko) - stillborn baby

I posted about the first one when I first came across it, and like mōdgethanc pointed out back then, skin is generally not attached directly to bone so it's kind of confusing. Vijay's speculation about it meaning the skin based on meat being bony especially in ancient times makes sense, but so does it meaning the sound of flesh coming off bones. I assume it means both, since logically those sounds should be similar enough... but whatever the case, it's a weirdly specific term.

Unfortunately, I don't really know any weird words in Russian (at least yet). The weirdest are probably these, so nothing that one couldn't expect to hear in an everyday conversation I guess:
гробокопатель - grave digger; tomb raider
гробовщик - mortician
куколка - doll; pupa; (according to Wiktionary also a derogatory term for an attractive woman)

asphodel
halibut
thistledown
paean
gorse
kipper
liege
tine
monkshood

Those are some very obscure words! Well done! I didn't even know most of them!

I've at least come across all of them except asphodel, thistledown, gorse, and monkshood. But yeah, Ipse kind of has a knack for finding obscure English words.

I knew gorse, kipper and liege, and I had heard of halibut but probably couldn't have told you what it was exactly, the rest are new to me.

I've seen/heard liege before in some historical stuff, but only in the second sense given on Wiktionary and never as an adjective AFAICR. Interestingly asphodel sounds familiar, too, but I'm fairly certain I've only seen it in the context of Greek mythology's afterlife.

Of the others, I could guess that monkshood was a plant either because it just sounds like the kind of name plants are given or I subconsciously made a connection to ukonhattu (old man's hat), which is what it's called in Finnish, and that thistledown was also a plant (and was wrong, since it's apparently a general term for a part of a plant rather than a species of plant), but the others just sound funny and I had no idea what any of them meant. Like, gorse? That sounds like the name of a bloodthirsty orc warrior in some Tolkienesque fantasy novel or something, not a plant...

I'd heard tines before but hadn't looked up what it meant because I just assumed it was a really common word that I should've already known long ago and didn't want to punish myself by getting the feeling of "oh, duh". Now that I know it's not and as such wouldn't have gotten that feeling if I had looked it up the first time I saw it, I'm kind of getting the feeling of "oh, duh".

By the way, one of the few plants I actually know the name of is fucking broomrape, precisely because of its name. Why do plants get all these weird ass names that make no sense? I know Wikipedia says its etymology has nothing to do with rape, but still...

[Ciarán12]

Whenever I come across a new word or phrase I don't know, I stick in a list which eventually gets fed into my Memrise course.

I do that too, only not with memrise or the like (I got fed up with them), I just have a list on Microsoft Word, so far it is 52 pages long.

I keep mine in a Google Sheets spreadsheet. I've only been doing it for a few months, I've got about 3000 entries so far.
I periodically update my memrise course form the list in batches of 50. Do you just revise your list every so often to remember the words? 50 pages of words seems like an aweful lot to revise that way!

Words picked up today from the account of the Algerian War that's taken me forever to finish: bariolé "garishly-coloured", tortionnaire "torturer", flétri "withered", quille "demob".

Reminds me, I know carrasco - torturer, executioner too. Interesting etymology, it comes from some guy's name!

It's been a long time since I made any flashcards or vocab lists to study from, but I always tried to avoid including anything too marginal. If I remember it, fine, but I'm not going to make any kind of effort.

Those are just the kind of words that I make an extra effort to add to flash cards precisely because they are marginal. The everyday stuff I'm going to remember easily enough just through natural exposure, it's the marginal ones that you always forget by the next time it comes up! And then you get that frustrating feeling of knowing you used to know it, but don't anymore, which I found demoralising, hence I made sure to write down and memorise every new thing I came across to make sure it didn't happen anymore.

[linguoboy]

Reminds me, I know carrasco - torturer, executioner too. Interesting etymology, it comes from some guy's name!

I remember making a list of equivalents of "hangman" once because I was surprised how diverse they were. The Romance terms, for instance, are nothing like each other.

Those are just the kind of words that I make an extra effort to add to flash cards precisely because they are marginal. The everyday stuff I'm going to remember easily enough just through natural exposure

Oh, I'm perfectly capable of not remembering the most everyday vocabulary. I can't tell you how many times I've had to look up the meaning of basic verbs in Korean, Persian, or Turkish.

[Ciarán12]

Oh, I'm perfectly capable of not remembering the most everyday vocabulary. I can't tell you how many times I've had to look up the meaning of basic verbs in Korean, Persian, or Turkish.

I think it probably depends on your exposure. For instance, it's taken me almost a year and a half of focusing solely on Portuguese, reading it, watching videos in it, speaking it exclusively for hours every day, pretty much the maximum possible exposure you could get to the language short of living in Brazil (and it's not far short of that, to be honest) just to be able to know all the basic vocab I need to have a conversation comfortably about whatever I want (within reason). And even so, I need memrise to keep the likes of argamassa and carrasco in my active vocabulary, because they almost never come up in conversation.
But when they do...BAM! I own that shit!

[IpseDixit]

With English words, I'll only try to include ones whose meanings aren't obvious at first glance:
prismatorhombated hecatonicosachoron
anthropophagolagnia
symphysy
extranoematic
abstersion
mysoped
coruscation
endysis
nymphectomy
saprophyte
xenography
synderesis
undinism
epithelium

Meh, you can at least get a vague sense of their meaning if you know a few Latin and Greek words/morphemes.

E.g:

xenography --> xeno- (foreign) -graphy (writing)

symphysy ---> sym- (with/together) -physy (nature, I think)

mysoped ---> myso- (hatred) -ped (child)

anthropophagolagnia---> anthropo- (human) -phago- (eating) -lagnia (ok, this one I have no idea what it means)

nymphectomy ---> -ectomy (asportation), but I have no idea what nymph- means.

[Naava]

гробокопатель - grave digger; tomb raider
гробовщик - mortician

My favourite Swedish word that I know is en begravningsentreprenör - mortician.

asphodel
halibut
thistledown
paean
gorse
kipper
liege
tine
monkshood

I knew liege and monkshood for some reason. I have no idea where I've learnt the latter. I also knew the word thistle so I guessed that thistledown must have something to do with it.

[IpseDixit]

Do you just revise your list every so often to remember the words? 50 pages of words seems like an aweful lot to revise that way!

So far the most I've done is flick through it tbh. Maybe one day I'll find the will to seriously revise it.

[Ciarán12]

My favourite Swedish word that I know is en begravningsentreprenör - mortician.

That is a great word. "begravening's entrepreneur". An entrepreneur who begravens people.

[linguoboy]

My favourite Swedish word that I know is en begravningsentreprenör - mortician.

That is a great word. "begravening's entrepreneur". An entrepreneur who begravens people.

Feels like a modish euphemism for an earlier term, just like morticians and undertakers prefer to be known as "funeral directors" these days.