Step 1
The Sesquipedalian Canon: 100 Essential Connoisseur Words
100 words
The 100 words a serious word-lover should know — the ones you collect, not memorize for a test. This list is deliberately not GRE redux. It assumes mastery of the standardized-test corpus and pushes into the territory beyond: rhetorical and philosophical terms of art, theological precision, untranslatable loanwords, literary archaisms, the "beautiful obscure" — the words used by Nabokov, Borges, DFW, Hitchens, Steiner, and the writers of The New York Review of Books when one ordinary word won't do.
These are words to use, not just recognize, but to use with care: most of them carry specific historical, religious, or technical weight. The notes emphasize provenance (where the word comes from), register (what kind of writing it belongs in), and the distinction it makes that no synonym captures.
Step 2
The Connoisseur's Working Lexicon (~300 words)
393 words
Includes the 100 canonical words from Tier 1 plus the next layer of specialized vocabulary used by serious word-lovers. This tier extends the canon into the technical vocabulary of philosophy, theology, rhetoric, and aesthetics — the working dictionary of someone who reads The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, the London Review of Books, and writes essays for Lapham's Quarterly or The American Scholar. Includes Latin and Greek terms of art, German philosophical loanwords, French aesthetic vocabulary, and the full apparatus of literary criticism. Words are alphabetized.
Step 3
The Sesquipedalian Compendium (1168 words)
1,162 words
Includes Tiers 1 and 2 plus a deep cut into the rarest English vocabulary — the words that distinguish the genuine connoisseur from the merely well-read. This is comprehensive territory: archaic English (forfend, whilom), classical loanwords (katabasis, peripeteia, anagnorisis), theological precision (homoousios, apocatastasis, hesychasm), rhetorical figures (polysyndeton, anastrophe, paralipsis), philosophical specialty terms (haecceity, qualia, noumenon), beautiful obscurities (petrichor, susurrus, fugacious), untranslatable loanwords from a dozen languages (saudade, sehnsucht, sprezzatura, jouissance), and the technical vocabulary of liturgy, prosody, alchemy, and esoteric tradition.
These are not GRE words. These are words for the reader who collects them deliberately — the lapidary vocabulary of Borges, Nabokov, Hitchens, Steiner, Sontag, DFW, McCarthy, and the writers worth reading slowly. Words are alphabetized.
