In The Meaning of Tingo , author Adam Jacot de Boinod admits that -- in researching his book -- he found many unusual foreign words that he could not, in the end, verify. Two of my favorite of these unverified words were attributed to Japanese: Age-otori , which means ‘to look worse after a haircut’...

It's been awhile since I've shared any of the weird words from Adam Jacot de Boinod's The Meaning of Tingo , so -- for travelers looking to wow (or just confuse) their international hosts -- here are a few choice global vocabularly nuggets: The Dutch word for skimming stones is plimpplamppletteren . Nakhur is Persian...

In the United States and England, the four suits in playing cards are 'diamonds', 'hearts', 'clubs' and 'spades'. According to an entry on Adam Jacot de Boinod's blog , however, other languages interpret these symbols differently. The French for clubs, for example, is "trèfles", meaning ‘clover’ (which makes more sense to me than 'clubs'). In...

This week's weird word from The Meaning of Tingo is areodjarekput , which is an Inuit word that means "to exchange wives for a few days only". Naturally, as author Adam Jacot de Boinod points out at his blog , this word raises the question: How exactly does this arrangement work? And at what point...