Reading the entire dictionary front to back! It’s something I’ve always wanted to try. Somehow, the letter H has been one of the weirdest, most varied parts of the book so far. What… horrors… does it have for us this week?

Things start out spooky this week with horror, defined as “painful and intense fear, dread, and dismay.” But it’s also “intense repugnance.” Not sure where handsome shirtless vampires fit into that.

The dictionary loves animals! A horse, of course, is “a large, solid-hoofed herbivorous domesticated as a draft and saddle animal.” This leads to almost an entire page of words with “horse-” as a prefix. Notable ones are horsehide, “dressed in the raw hide of a horse,” horse latitudes, “two calm regions near 30-degree north and 30-degree south,” and horsewoman, “a woman skilled at riding horseback.”

Hot is obviously “marked by high temperatures,” but it’s also where the dictionary gets into its criminal side with “recently and illegally obtained” with “jewels” in parenthesis, followed by “unusually lucky or favorable” with “dice” in parenthesis. How is it decided which specifics go in the parenthesis?

Then there’s house, “a building for human habitation” and the like. This is followed by a whole page of “house-” prefix words. A housefly is “a dipteran fly that is common about human habitations.” I flipped back to the Ds, and dipteran is just “relating to, or being a fly.” Kind of a tease on the part of the housefly, there.

Got a new one here. A huarache is “a sandal with an upper made of interwoven leather strips. A quick Google search shows that the Nike corporation has used this word as a brand for a whole bunch of different running shoes. Is… that okay? I don’t know if these things are okay or not.

Just what is the nature of humanity? It’s “the quality or state of being human,” which doesn’t tell us much, but it’s also “the branches of learning dealing with human concerns (as philosophy) as opposed to natural processes (as physics).” That’s a place to start, I suppose.

Somehow hunky-dory made it into the dictionary, defined as “quite satisfactory.” I imagine you’re a person who uses one of those two terms, but never both.

Here’s a weird one, and it’s another animal one. The dictionary says a hydra is “any of numerous small tubular freshwater coelenterates that are polyps having at one end a mouth surrounded by tentacles.” There’s no word about the hydra of myth and fantasy. Some additional googling reveals that there actually is a real-life hydra, a tiny basis for the gigantic fantasy creature!

The letter H has been a wild ride these last few weeks, so it’s appropriate that it concludes with hysteria, “unmanageable fear or outbursts of emotion,” and hysterics, “a fit of uncontrollable laughter or crying.” That’s what trying to read an entire dictionary does to you.

Next: I spy.  

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