Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words By Barbara Wallraff.

An entertaining book if you're a lover of language. Especially if you're constantly wondering if there's a word for things that you encounter but can't name. You know... like when you experience a particular feeling or see someone perform an action that seems like it should have a name but doesn't.

(Incidentally, the first time I can remember this happening to me was in college when I noticed that in most chests of drawers there is a rather large unused space underneath the bottom drawer that is entirely inaccessible and inconvenient - but takes up about 1/10th of the available space... What's the name for that space? If you had a little-used room in your home that took 10% of the space you'd name it, wouldn't you? [Actually... we did - it's the crawl-space.] So why not name that space under the bottom drawer?)

Sadly, I've found that most books in this space are written more for people that are interested in being witty than for people interested in actually contributing to language.

Word Fugitives is somewhere in between. It combines some humorous and completely unusable words (e.g. "pandephonium" - The word describing what happens when a cell phone rings and everyone has to check to be sure it isn't theirs) with some viable ones that are actually in the OED (e.g., "ruly" - meaning obedient.)

Is it really usable for a namer? No, not really. But it is a refreshing read - and it allows us to see how people address naming when given a more casual canvas. There are some very predictable patterns follwed here - and a strong namer can learn from them - and perhaps avoid them. The big one is taking two words and mashing them together to create a witty word such as "bleakend" (for a weekend with no anticipated fun.) This type of word that relies on homonymics and patterning is everywhere in this book. Yes, it is cute. But it is also not particularly novel, given that almost every other word in the book was created in the same way.

And yes, there's a name for this type of word - it is a portmanteau.

As a wordsmith of a sort myself I'm far more interested in the less humor-driven and more viable (perhaps pattern-avoiding) words. Only recently did I stumble upon cross-word dictionaries as perhaps the best source of these more rare words. They're not easy to find, as you must know what you're looking for (instead of just skimming through an entire book of odd or archaic words) but once found you can refer back to the OED or Google for more context.

Where do the rest of you namers and linguists go for these hard-to-find gems? Any favorite books that help you expand your vocabulary or name the previously unnamable?