Book Review: The Horologicon

I am one big word buff. I love learning new words, and particularly their origins. So it was a complete surprise when I stumbled across this lovely book (and its prequel The Etymologicon) at a bookstore couple of weeks back. A complete surprise because it was so much fun reading it! Described as 'a day's jaunt through the lost words of the English language', The Horologicon is a wonderful trip that revisits some of the words that were too beautiful to live long, too amusing to be taken seriously, too precise to become common, too vulgar to survive in polite society, or too poetic to thrive in this age of prose (as Forsyth mentions in the Preambulation).

The Horologicon

Not just being a mere collection of some obscure words, The Horologicon is rather well-arranged according to the hour of the day (hence the title) right from Dawn, when an expurgefactor wakes you up from slumber, to your attempts at working in office during the day till you proceed bedwards at Midnight.

Mark Forsyth clearly understands the difficulties with conventional dictionaries which list the words in alphabetical order. To quote again from the Preambulation, ... when words are arranged alphabetically they are uselessly separated. In the OED, for example, aardvarks are 19 volumes away from the zoo, ... And so it's quite near impossible to find out the meaning of a related word, unless of course you already happen to know the word.

In this context, The Horologicon comes across as incredibly useful (although quite ironically the words are out of date!) to connect different words that were used eons ago to describe the daily mundane activities of men (and women). The book on the whole is thoroughly enjoyable, witty and sometimes irreverent even, yet it is totally fun-filled and keeps you engaged as you learn of the bizarre words that were in vogue. It may be a book with an etymological bent, but to me The Horologicon will that one book I will doubtless keep coming back again and again, for it's both enriching and entertaining. A must read for any logophile!