week 4

i finally shot some blanks. in fact, a series of them: bww, kqq, and mlv. but then i hit the jackpot with ufe which returned 87 hits, all of them delightfully weird and most of them freakishly exotic. i had a lot of trouble selecting the best word but ultimately arrived at pfuiteufel because of how foreign the word looks and how agreeable it is to say (especially while affecting a look of disgust): FOOEY-TOOFUL.

pfuiteufel is of course a german loanword and is cognate with our own phooie + the word for devil. the next time that your one cousin tells you how awkward it was hooking up with your other cousin during your great aunt’s wake, this is the word that you wanna use while accompanied by a mr. yuck face.

here are some other radical ufe words. though they don’t look like it, they are all used in english:

agrufe · with face downward; prone
aufe · a misbegotten, deformed, or idiot child
bibufenn · above
enschaufe · to heat with passion, inflame, excite
goufe · a whirlpool
lutero-rufescent · of a reddish yellow color
saufey · the sum paid for recovering lost property
stufe · a hot-air bath
tartufe · a hypocritical pretender to religion
unberufen · an injunction to fate that nothing will go wrong (“knock on wood”)
vorlaufer · a skier who travels a course before a race in order to establish a standard by which the competitors are marked
wanrufe · disquiet, unrest

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this is a post in the ragbag word summer series. for this series, i search for words in the oh ee dee that contain a randomly generated string of 3 letters and report my findings. it is a thrill ride.

previous selections have been: acyrological (incorrect in use of words) lobcock (a blundering fool), and crwth (an ancient celtic violin).