Saturday, October 31, 2026 | 11:20 AM
I am sharing, for the first time, my curated notes from various vocabulary notebooks, both paper-based and digital, all compiled into one place after years of hunting all over documents to find the perfect word; here they are in one place and in order, and I’ve added additional reference notes to make it work more like a real dictionary or more like a writer’s thesaurus. Here’s the link to download the document as a PDF. First, a few notes about this booklet so you know what’s in here.
Part I, the glossary: 600+ words in A-to-Z order with part of speech and definition. It covers words like anon, ere, athwart, wan, gules, heath, bower, ope and charm’d. It also includes heraldic colors, contractions like ’tis and ‘twixt, and old verb forms such as clomb, durst, wist and quoth.
Part II, the idioms: Nearly 200 Romantic and Victorian expressions, including “Gracious me!”, “By all that’s holy!”, “Upon my soul!”, “Depend upon it” and “Heaven forfend!”. They’re grouped by mood: surprise, oaths, grief, vexation, scorn, approval, courtesy and leave-taking, feelings, and everyday comment. Each one has a short note on region and register: British or American, genteel or rustic, and whether it already sounded old-fashioned at the time.
Notes on use, at the front: a short section on marking elisions for meter (charm’d versus blessèd), the thou/thee/thy forms, and verb endings like hast, doth and wert.
I wrote the definitions and era tags from general knowledge of the language (with some help from some very old glossary books from the Stuart era). I didn’t check them against a commercial historical dictionary such as the OED or against the poets’ own texts, so treat the dates as approximate. The book doesn’t say which poet used which word, except for Keats’s “gules” in The Eve of St. Agnes, to avoid wrongly tying words to poets. If you question one of my definitions, look it up and let me know if I need to make an edit.
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