by Christine Swint

I’m sure you’ve noticed the new Wordle prompt Dana started here on Read Write Poem. She’s been collecting favorite words from a variety of Read Write Poem participants and turning them into cool visuals for us to use as writing prompts.

Words are a poet’s stock in trade, this we know. Not only do we want to find adequate words, we are constantly on the prowl for the le mot juste. It has to sound right, look good next to its neighbors, and create a certain aura of luminosity, transcendence, darkness or depravity, depending on the poem.

Sometimes we turn to websites, like the one you’re reading now, for a jump start. A certain word, like Kimberlee’s Juicy, might be the combination of syllables you need to get your poetic engines revved.

There are tons of great sites on the web devoted to words and phrases. While you might have your favorites, here are a few I’ve looked at recently.

• The Phrase Finder, from the UK. This is a fun website because not only does it offer a thesaurus of phrases, it also explains and lists idioms from both sides of the pond.
• The Urban Dictionary has compiled slang terms and current word usage since 1999. They supply sentences illustrating the correct use of the term.
• Creativity Tools is a site Nathan told me about. There’s a random word generator with different categories, ranging from very common to obscure. When I asked for a very common, intransitive verb, I got “rotate.” When I changed the word complexity to obscure, I got “labiovelerize.” This latter term was right on the tip of your tongue, wasn’t it?

Of course the best way to find words you like is to read books by authors who write poems and stories you enjoy. Some poets have a way with turning words both exotic and mundane into seamless tapestries of images. I think the words must flow in their bloodstream after all the reading and writing they’ve done.

While I’m reading I keep my notebook next to me, and jot down words and phrases I like, or words that are new to me. Lately I’ve been reading Dog Years by Mark Doty, a poet and memoirist who recently won a National Book Award for his latest collection of poems, Fire to Fire. Here’s a list of words I’ve accumulated in the last few days: fey, bathos, inchoate, insouciance, gambrel, flinty, concatenation, clank, promontory, oviod.

We find words we like from a variety of sources, from conversations, comic books, the classics, dictionaries, TV, movies, any place people communicate in language. The idea is not to use the most arcane words we can find, but to find the ones that make our poems more uniquely us, a better reflection of the thoughts that are swimming around inside us. For me, that means reading a lot, and understanding the context in which the words are used. Of course we can always broaden the context, and find a new way to make a particular word come alive. That’s what poets do.

Do you have any new favorite words? If you like you can share them in the comments section, and tell us where you found them!