On The Origin of D&D Words

[sniffles]

Very interesting and entertaining! Thanks for sharing!

But it still did not tell me how to pronounce "dweomer"!

 

[VirgilCaine]

Very interesting and entertaining! Thanks for sharing!

But it still did not tell me how to pronounce "dweomer"!

Dwimmer. Rhymes with "swimmer."

 

[Bloodstone Press]

Just when you thought your system has had as many surprises as it could handle, I've got one more for you. If you were very, very lucky, your D&D character might, after years of hard labour, be lucky enough to find a magical Libram of Gainful Conjuration, a magical book of great power. Trouble is, there's no such thing, or at least, there's no such word. *Libram is, as far as I can tell, a complete fabrication. And yet today, it is widely used in role-playing games, and has over 8,000 Google hits,

Back when I started publishing, I wanted to use the word Libram for a book title, but I likewise couldn't find any info on it. So I wrote to Gary Gygax, and to some language expert at Websters.

Gary said it was a variant of a Latin word (IIRC), but since it was mostly a made up word, there was not any “rules” about how to use it.

The people from Websters said it was most likely derived from Latin as well, but apparently misspelled.

In all seriousness, D&D's tendency to use older, "bigger" words has actually stood my daughter and son in good stead in high school English

Yeah, when I was in high school I took a vocabulary class. One the first day of class I stunned the teacher with words like Greeves, pauldrons, tassets, adjudicate, charisma, and others.

Since I've been publishing, I've made use of as many obscure words as I could to try and give something of the same sort back to the community. I've got an old, unabridged webster's dictionary that is full of cool words like callithumpian, coruscation, and vulpine, to name a few.

 

[afreed]

Yeah, very good article; there are many other terms in D&D that would be amusing to chase down, ignoring, of course, all the "false Tolkeinisms", such as treant and balor.

Balor's actually real (linguistically speaking); nasty being from Celtic mythology. Here's a Wikipedia link for the details.

(And yes, that is a great article!)

 

[Kaledor]

Dwimmer. Rhymes with "swimmer."

Thank you.
I butcher it different everytime.

da-WOAH-mer

was one that came out one game night.

 

[StupidSmurf]

Thank you.
I butcher it different everytime.

da-WOAH-mer

was one that came out one game night.

I always thought it was DWEE-mur

 

[sniffles]

I'd assume based on Tolkien's use of it (he was a professor of philology, after all) that it's dwimmer.

D&D books need to include pronunciation glossaries for these obscure words. I know there was a thread already about this topic, but just look at how many monster names have contended pronunciations. How many people didn't know how to pronounce "paladin"? I grew up watching "Have Gun Will Travel" on tv so I knew, but anyone under the age of 40 probably doesn't know it from that source. And your average American Standard dictionary isn't going to include words like "pauldron" or "guisarme"; it isn't just the invented monster names that are problematic.

I love learning about the sources of words, but it would be nice to include pronunciation in that information, too.

 

[Sleepy Voiced]

Funny, I read that article, turned and picked up the book I had been reading, and there, on the very page in front of me was the word "Libram". I happened to be reading Jack Vance's "Eyes of the Overworld" and had just gotten to chapter six, wherein a wizard has been captured by rat-men and was bemoaning the loss of his libram of spells. I had just started reading Vance for the first time earlier this week, and I do believe this is the first time I noticed the word "Libram", having first read "the Dying Earth". I guess that must be where Gygax found it. Although, I wouldn't be surprised to find "Libram" in some of Clark Ashton Smith's stuff.

 

[Branding Opportunity]

I still remember the time in 9th grade biology class when I tried to use "polymorph" in a sentence. I still cringe when I remember the teacher making fun of me

 

[BluWolf]

Excelletn article. Thanks for posting.