#word lists

[moonlit-floruit]

the masterlist

links to the lists I've made on this blog, not including asks (yet). I'm not gonna lie, this lists of lists mainly exists just so I can remember which ones I've already done.

name lists:

1800s: french canadian, mexican

1920s: feminine, masculine, nyc, portuguese

4-letter names

-a endings, masculine

american civil war: feminine, masculine

-ana endings, feminine

animals

arthurian non-canon

-as, -is, ending in

-ce endings

ch sound

colour -> red, pink, ochre, green, blue, purple, brown, gray, black, white

d&d classes: rogue

-ee sound endings

ethereal feminine

elements: earth, fire, water

-er endings

fairycore

fire & forge surnames

floral

gems & minerals

gr- beginnings

greek pantheon: aphrodite, iris

-ia endings

immortality

-l endings, fem/neutral

-l endings, masc/neutral

love: anti-love, beloved

lovecraftian ocs

medieval

monosyllabic

music

nocturnal

o- beginnings

-o endings, feminine

palindromes

ph- beginnings

poisonous plants

queens of historical europe

radiance

regency era london

royal

safety

seasons: spring, winter

space: space terms, stars

stone surnames, subtle

storms

sweet

-t endings

tea

-th endings

trees

v, names containing

warrior queen vibes

witchy vibes

x, names containing

z, names containing

word lists:

botanical, medieval

flowers, victorian meanings

gemstones

landscape, medieval

mining, medieval

red, medieval

trees, victorian meanings

if you have any issues or see any mistakes, just let me know :)

[er-cryptid]

Musical Instruments (Norwegian)

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[linestorm]

Making word banks in my little notebook. These pages eventually became 220 Scents and Words To Describe Scent.

[robinwoodsfiction]

Writing Pep Talk

Writing regularly takes diligence…and people leaving you alone. I thought you might need a little pep talk. Here are twelve encouragements/reminders to keep you writing. 12 Writing Encouragements 1. Start by eating chocolate. It always helps to get those creative juices flowing! 2. Get comfortable. Wear your comfiest PJs, grab a cozy blanket, and settle in for some creative writing! 3.…

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[chouhatsumimi]

I like to make word lists as I read/watch series. Here are the series I’ve posted about so far! Most are just partial lists from here and there, but others I’m trying for more complete lists.

Japanese in Manga:

Ajin

Akatsuki no Yona/Yona of the Dawn

Asobi Asobase

Boys Run the Riot

Deadman Wonderland

Fumetsu no Anata e/To Your Eternity

Gangsta

Gokushufudō/Way of the House Husband

Helvetica

Karneval

Lookback

Mushishi

Noragami

Nukoduke!

Ōoku

Ouran High School Host Club

Qualia under the Snow

Something's Wrong With Us

The Promised Neverland

Tonari no Seki-kun

generic list of manga words

Japanese in Anime:

Aggretsuko

Ajin (incl. drama CDs)

Beastars

Demon Slayer/Kimetsu no Yaiba

Dorohedoro

first episodes (various)

Non Non Biyori

Usagi Drop

I also have some vocab lists for use with anime clubs

And the general tag Japanese in Anime

Novels! (gasp!) of varying length and complexity:

No.6

Yoru Café (link includes some reblogs too)

Other useful tags:

Resources

Day in the life of translation

Community

[yukusaki]

Tea-related words!

Anyone who knows me knows I love tea (and am in fact drinking tea right now), so here are a few tea-related words for my tea-loving nakama (chakama?).

First, the kanji for tea, 茶, is read ちゃ with almost no exception, but on rare occasion is read さ (ex. 喫茶店・きっさてん・café and 茶道・さどう・tea ceremony)

Types of tea and tea foods

お茶　generally refers to green tea but isn’t super specific like 緑茶（りょくちゃ）green tea or, even more specific, one of the many types of green tea like 煎茶sencha, ほうじ茶 houjicha, 玉露 gyokuro, etc.

紅茶（こうちゃ）black tea. Surprisingly, there are a few types of 和紅茶（わこうちゃ）, Japanese black tea (I sometimes have a particular organic one from Nara).  

ハーブティー　herbal tea

茶菓子（ちゃがし）the version of 和菓子（わがし）, Japanese traditional sweets, which are tea-flavored or use tea in the ingredients.

ちゃがゆ (sometimes written in the kanji 茶粥)　the version of おかゆ, a rice porridge often made for someone who isn’t feeling well, made with green tea instead of water (houjicha, a low-caffeine tea, is traditional.)

Words used when talking about tea:

茶葉（ちゃば） tea leaves (unused)

茶殻（ちゃがら） used tea leaves

浸出（しんしゅつ）steeping (a bit specific/technical, used often as 浸出時間. お茶を入れる is also just fine to say “make tea”)

And DON’T come at me with the “but green tea is so bitter!” until you’ve had PROPERLY made green tea and that is the hill I will die on.  Don’t use boiling water!  Don’t leave the tea leaves/teabag in too long!  Stop squeezing out your teabag!  Don’t skimp on the tea leaves!

Some words that use 茶 but are actually unrelated to tea:        

無茶（むちゃ）reckless, illogical, unreasonable (more often talking about an action, not a person); and 無茶苦茶（むちゃくちゃ）jumbled, mixed up; unrestrained, excessive—it’s not ucommon to see these written in hiragana instead of kanji; and 茶番（ちゃばん）farce.冬にその山に登るなんて彼は無茶だ　He’d be crazy to climb the mountain in winter

デイジーの周りには無茶苦茶な噂が飛び交ってた　Wild rumors were circulating about Daisy.

赤茶ける（あかちゃける）to turn reddish brown (赤茶けた+”noun”=reddish-brown “noun”; 白茶ける（しらちゃける） to discolor

茶目な・茶目っ気（ちゃめ）mischievous

Fun fact—Matcha is the healthiest form of green tea because you consume the entire leaf instead of just the water steeped with the leaves.

[embyrinitalics]

ARGENT... beautiful. Perfect. Especially useful that it's a little unfamiliar. In terms of other color synonyms, I know I'm using sable for black, but I've been searching for words on the same level for other colors, particularly green, red, blue, and gold. Any suggestions?

Words are amazing and endless! (and I love them so much 😭) Colors are especially great, I think, because you can pull them from literally anywhere and get a totally different flavor.

I generally like to pull from gemstones, metalworking, and nature. But if by “on the same level” you mean equally obscure, here are some fun color words that I've come across:

foxfire the phosphorescent light emitted by certain fungi

verdant of the bright green color of lush grass

bittersweet a plant typically bearing poisonous red berries

sanguineous Bloodred; of, relating to, or involving bloodshed

cyanean or cyaneous cerulean; of dark blue

aurous of, relating to, or containing gold

Fandom-specific colors are always fun too, and can make your writing feel more immersive. Breath of the Wild especially has loads of compendium entries and places to pull colors from. And of course you can always google “Words for (color)” or pop the color into your favorite online thesaurus for more options. (Thesaurus.com or Power Thesaurus, for example.)

Thanks for the ask! 😍

[lexiconga]

Helpful Word Lists

Helpful Word Lists

I periodically search for helpful word lists to use when I'm starting (or picking back up) a constructed language (English words, specifically, because that's my native language), and I've found several helpful ones over the years. If you're getting started on a new conlang or maybe you're stuck on what words your language might need, try checking out some of these lists to help get you going. Most of them are split up by either part of speech or "type" of word, so they're great resources:

The Swadesh List

The Swadesh List is a list of about 100 words/concepts used for linguistic comparison named after Morris Swadesh. It's a very handy list that's helpful for getting started on building your conlang's lexicon, but 100 words is really not very many words. The famous toki pona conlang (Wikipedia link, or here's a more useful website if you're interested in learning it) has about 120 "official" words, and even then, many words do double duty (or more) to get a full breadth of concepts across! (Please note: this is not a criticism of toki pona in the slightest—most of my conlangs aim to be as streamlined as toki pona...and fail.)

Basic English

Basic English is an auxlang designed by Charles Ogden in 1925 to simplify English down to its most essential words for communication. Putting aside criticisms of the auxlang, it's a very useful list of anywhere from 850–2000 words to help get a good idea of words that you might want to include in your conlang! Apparently, the 2000-word Basic English list and "Voice of America's Special English 1500 word list" are all that's used for Wikipedia's nifty Simple English translation of their articles.

Word Frequency List(s)

Wikipedia has a list of the top 100 most common English words, and they do the great courtesy of separating them by part of speech on the page! As I said before, while this is very helpful, 100 is a pretty small collection of words. You can find other larger word lists from random sites, but the ones I've seen don't separate the list by part of speech, which is not particularly helpful for conlanging...

I recently hit the jackpot in my search for word lists when I found https://www.wordfrequency.info, where they provide the top 5000 words from the Corpus of Contemporary American English in order of frequency AND by part of speech! The whole list can be found on that site here: https://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y and here is an archive link to the free page just in case it ever gets lost to time.

5000 words is a lot to sift through, but I'm planning on going through and grouping similar words for my own use and sharing it here. This may not be useful to everyone, but as I mentioned earlier, most of my conlangs aim to emulate toki pona's simplicity and small number of words, so combining words with similar meanings is something I end up doing anyway.

A Conlanger’s Thesaurus

Soon after posting this, I was made aware of this very handy document that was originally posted in 2014 and was updated January 2020 called A Conlanger’s Thesaurus by William S. Annis (here’s a direct link to PDF). The document is particularly helpful because it includes notes and helpful details in addition to just the raw words!

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If you have other word lists that you've found useful or you have similar word lists for other languages that will help non-English-speaking conlangers get started on their lexicons, please send them my way by either replying to this post or sending a message here or here!