yest. (1) The foam, spume, or flower of beer in fermentation; barm.
(2) The spume on a troubled sea.
– Johnson’s Dictionary: A Modern Selection
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demonocracy. Government by demons. Greek daimon, a ministering spirit; kratos, rule … There is also the form demonarchy (Greek arche, rule), which seems a better word to employ than demonocracy, lest one elide a syllable.
– Dictionary of Early English by the ever-witty Joseph T. Shipley (1955).
fret. (1) A frith, or strait of the sea, where the water by confinement is always rough.
(2) Any agitation of liquors by fermentation, confinement, or other cause.
– Johnson’s Dictionary : A Modern Selection by Samuel Johnson (1755), ed. E. L. McAdam and George Milne (1963)
There is a bird called the YBIS (Ibis) which cleans out its bowels with its own beak. It enjoys eating corpses or snakes’ eggs, and from such things it takes food home for its young, which comes most acceptable. It walks about near the seashore by day and night, looking for little dead fish or other bodies which have been thrown up by the waves. It is afraid to enter the water because it cannot swim.
– The Book of Beasts : Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century Made and Edited by T. H. White (1954).
BUSK. A piece of whalebone or ivory, formerly worn by women, to stiffen the forepart of their stays: hence the toast, ‘both ends of the busk.’
– 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue : A Dictionary of British Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence (unabridged) compiled originally by Captain Grose
gesta: Deeds or tales of adventure, as in the fourteenth-century Gest Historiale of the Destruction of Troy. One of the most famous medieval collections of tales was the Gesta Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans).
– Literary Terms : A Dictionary by Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz.
pro’mptuary. A storehouse; a repository; a magazine.
– Johnson’s Dictionary : A Modern Selection by Samuel Johnson (1755), ed. E. L. McAdam and George Milne (1963)
POMPKIN. A man or woman of Boston in America: from, the number of pompkins raised and eaten by the people of that country. Pompkinshire; Boston and its dependencies.
– 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue : A Dictionary of British Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence (unabridged) compiled originally by Captain Grose
facinorous. Extremely wicked, infamous; grossly criminal. The word, naturally, is accented on the sin.
– Dictionary of Early English by Joseph T. Shipley (1955).