From the corner of my eye I saw her. Of course this chance encounter with Rebecca wasn’t serendipitous. (I’m not throwing that word out there to illustrate my broad vocabulary, but rather to show that...

The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop.

How many words are you having trouble with, sir?Just the ones that I’ve highlighted.I count at least a dozen, and I haven’t gotten out of the first paragraph.That’s as far as I got, too. I’m...

A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary.

The word ‘suffering’ is not in my vocabulary.

Don’t call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it’s not sexist.

Choose your words meticulously and then let them rumble up from some deep furnace of conviction.

I understand the gist of your speculation,’ said Rhialto. ‘It is most likely nuncupatory.

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?” asked Mrs. Dodypol. “It depends,” says I, “how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.

Metaphor isn’t just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn’t scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language...

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is...

Harken Brethren, head this impetuous realm! Tarry me far from hearth and home I fear we shall fair *snort* not well!” And so being collectively agreed, but individually impaled, the diminutive swine sought each to...

Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary – I know all the other words. None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does.

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one’s vocabulary and the greater one’s awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more...

Few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary.

We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.

Milton’s learned vocabulary […] and his distant perspectives, represent the authoritative unintelligibility of the parents’ speech as heard by the child.

Most adults have a vocabulary of around 60,000 words, meaning that children must learn 10 to 20 words a day between the ages of eight months and 18 years. And yet the most frequent 100...

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty...

Coin a new word and hear it jingle in your pocket with all your other change. My love for you is sofacouchsitsitting, so you’d better buckle up.

Those guys are fags.” Gay is not a synonym for shitty. If you wanna say something’s shitty, say it’s shitty. Stop being such homophobic assholes.

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology’s virtues.

My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary.

To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don’t know, or worse,...

I have to think of moderation, which is not a word that’s in my vocabulary. But I try.

Everything good I have written about can be summed up in two words: Ryan Lilly.” That’s a real quote I read in a real book. Trust me, I’m a writer.

I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter “Nike” and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.

By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.

A picture is worth 1,000 megapixels. High-definition (HD) TV images are used to camouflage some writers’ low-definition (LD) vocabulary.

There was a language specific to all things. The ability to learn another language in one arena, whether it was music, medicine, or finance, could be used to accelerate learning and other arenas, too.

[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.

My love grows long, and my smile is wide. My gaze is deep, and my penchant for making up words is apopleggio.

I collect words–they are sweets in the mouth of sound.

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.

It is our duty and our joy to communicate our hearts to each other. Words assist us in this task.

She took a moment to lament her lack of parasol. Every time she left the house, she felt keenly the absence of her heretofore ubiquitous accessory.

When Internet parlance finds its way into our accepted vocabulary, it becomes a cliché.

Who needs a large vocabulary when you can just make up any word at any time? It makes life a whole lot more emeaglibop.

If you can count to two, you can count to anything!

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

I’d call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.

How can I?

The more words you know, the more clearly and powerfully you will think…and the more ideas you will invite into your mind.

Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.

‘Stay’ is a charming word in a friend’s vocabulary.

Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called.