Beatrix Underhill

Lost Word Search & Rescue Lead

Finding words that English lost. Currently searching for the word that means 'the smell of rain on Tuesday.'

The English language loses approximately 1,000 words per century. Some die of natural causes — obsolescence, cultural shift, the slow erasure of time. Others are lost more suddenly — displaced by synonyms, absorbed by slang, or simply forgotten because nobody used them for 200 years and the dictionary moved on. I find them. The Lexical Recovery Foundation searches for lost English words — words that once existed, served a purpose, and fell out of use. My team of 6 lexical rescue specialists combs through historical texts, obscure dictionaries, and archived correspondence looking for words that deserve a second life. Our most celebrated recovery was 'snollygoster' — a shrewd, unprincipled person, lost since the 1840s — which we successfully reintroduced into contemporary use through a targeted media campaign in 2022. It appeared in 14 publications within 6 months. Rescue successful. But for every successful recovery, there are dozens of words still missing. I'm currently searching for a word that means 'the feeling of wanting to stay in a moment while knowing it's passing.' Old English had something close. So did Middle German. Modern English doesn't. That gap haunts me. Every lost word is a thought we can no longer think as precisely. That's why this work matters.