Words you learned through D&D

[Larcen]

First 5 that come to mind.

1) piton
2) caltrop
3) i.e.
5) e.g.
6) et al.

God, I love the 1E DMG...

 

[NiTessine]

Hmm... I got "ziggurat" from Warhammer (specifically, chaos dwarves) before I ever got into D&D and "gazebo" I learned from Heroes of Might & Magic II. "Milieu" I always knew because it shares the root word (or is the root word, I'm not sure) for the Finnish word "miljöö".

Now...
"Verisimilitude", from 3.0 Dungeon Master's Guide.
"Fane", from Demon God's Fane.
"Effulgent", from Forgotten Realms.
And the names of the polearms and Japanese weaponry, from AD&D 2E Player's Handbook and Oriental Adventures, respectively.

There are also many others I'm pretty sure I picked up from D&D and related materials, such as "vile", "squamous", "chthonic", "sepulcher", "jejune"... Gary Gygax and Ed Greenwood, I think, are the two D&D writers who most seem to delight in using obscure words. With both, I've regularly run into stuff that none of my dictionaries recognised. There was one character in Elminster's Temptation who was especially bad.

 

[DK]

I'm italian and.... I've learned english thanks to D&D! Seriously!
The amount of D&D books was very limited when I was a kid so togheter with some friends we bought many D&D books and translated them! I remember translating the whole Dark Sun campaing setting!

My girlfriend, who is american, always asks me: "where have you learned that word?!?"

Eh eh!

 

[Knightfall]

verisimilitude (don't remember probably 1eDMG)

That's the one that came right to mind, first.

I also learned the difference between "rogue" and "rouge" when 3rd Edition came around. Man, I hated having to go though all my Word files to replace everywhere it said "rouge" with "rogue".

Portcullis and ziggurat are also good choices.

And who could forget paralyzation and polymorph after 2nd Edition came out.

Other words I learned from D&D: Abyss, griffon/griffin, concordance, ogre, samurai & ronin, katana, Sumurian, Babalyon, proficiency, morningstar, phylactery, conjuration, abjuration, illusion, astral, ethereal, Limbo, Elysian, norse, Excalibur, etc.

I could go on and on, but i won't.

KF72

 

[wmasters]

It's a long list for me, largely of words that have already been listed here, lots of weapons and creatures (knowing what a hippogriff was definately an advantage when I studied Greek Mythology at school!). Others that spring to mind

Cleric
Pyrotechnics
Scry

 

[Tsillanabor]

So many that I can't name them all. My favorite is a scientific latin animal-vampiroteuthis infernalis. I made a huge one and through it at my players along with a picture of the thing.

 

[Danzauker]

I'm italian and.... I've learned english thanks to D&D! Seriously!
The amount of D&D books was very limited when I was a kid so togheter with some friends we bought many D&D books and translated them! I remember translating the whole Dark Sun campaing setting!

My girlfriend, who is american, always asks me: "where have you learned that word?!?"

Eh eh!

I'm Italian, too, and I share the same feelings.

Actually, I'm a bit surprised that so many native English speaking people found so many obscure words in D&D books and modules.

I mean, I had of course lots of problems translating the books (not easy to translate from one language to another when you are a 12 y old kid with just a couple of ranks in Language(English)), but I usually knew the meaning of the corresponding Italian word.

Wonder if the writers intentionally used rarer variants of common terms...

 

[Melan]

I am Hungarian and I pretty much learned English because I wanted to play AD&D. That aside, three words:
role - I initially thought this was "rule" misspelled in the books, and even "corrected" the word the first few times it cropped up
eldritch - where else can you find this word, except Clark Ashton Smith's books?
glaive-guisarme - I still don't know what the hell this means, but it is some sort of hafted weapon, I think.
Also phylactery, girdle, periapt and all the other Gygaxian stuff. I have to credit Palladium Fantasy with "jazeraint" (scale armour), though.

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

I find the words I learned the most fall into three categories:

Medieval archaic terms: barbican, trebuchet, castillian, etc.

Odd adjectives or nouns from spell names: lucubration, prestidigitation, sepia, etc.

Genre or mythological terms: arcane, eldritch, gorgon, etc.

One word that stands out is brazier. It stands out because I didn't actually learn how to pronounce it until I mentioned the term "flaming brassiere" to my aunt.

 

[Eridanis]

Wonder if the writers intentionally used rarer variants of common terms...

I don't think the words used were intended to obfuscate. Remember, Gygax and his fellows had spent years of free time reading books of history (ancient, medieval, and military), biography, and literature (both mundane and fantastical). That storehouse of vocabulary was at their disposal when writing the rulebooks, and since you generally want to be precise while writing, there was no reason to avoid a precise, correct word just on the basis of being unfamiliar. We, the Gentle Readers, became the beneficiaries of that vocabulary, and have it now to pass on to later generations.

Rereading that last paragraph, I think I proved my point...