Tharoorosaurus

Shashi Tharoor is known for a vocabulary that sends other people to the dictionary, and in Tharoorosaurus he opens that word-hoard to the reader. The book gathers fifty-three uncommon words he loves, drawn from across the alphabet, and presents each one as a small curiosity to enjoy rather than a lesson to memorise.

Every entry comes with the story behind the word: a fun fact, an anecdote, or a bit of background on how it came to mean what it does. You do not need to be a devoted student of language to follow along. Curiosity about why words look and sound the way they do is enough.

The book promises a few new conversation pieces along the way, and perhaps a cure for the fear of long words, which has a famously long name of its own.