Reading the entire dictionary front to back! It’s something I’ve always wanted to try. The letter I continues to be… interesting.
Let’s go deep inside the word inside. It’s “an inner side,” which strikes me a little obvious. But it’s also “inward nature, thoughts or feelings,” “a position of power, trust or familiarity,” and “viscera, entrails.” Talk about covering all the bases.
Inspiration is “the act or power of moving the intellect or imagination,” and “an inspiring agent or influence.” But somehow, inspiration is also “inhalation.” Inhalation of what, I wonder?
Insufferable is simply, “not to be endured.” Sounds a little judgmental on the part of the dictionary writers.
Interatomic sounds like it’d be something cool, but it’s merely “existing or acting between atoms.” It does raise the question, though, of what could possibly be in this space between atoms. Grant Morrison probably answered this in some comic somewhere.
Then we get to the opposite of interatomic with intergalactic, “relating to or situated in the spaces between galaxies.” If space is empty, then this isn’t so dissimilar to interatomic. If there’s aliens out there, who’s to say there are aliens between atoms as well? Oops, I’m going all Grant Morrison again.
I think we all remember inveigle from that one episode of The X-Files, now here’s the definition. “To win over with flattery,” and “to acquire through ingenuity or flattery.” That Mulder is such a flatterer.
The in- prefix finally comes to an end with inward, which is “toward the inside, center, or interior,” and “directed toward the interior.” But it’s also, “mental, spiritual,” which is about as broad as a definition can get.
Iron gets a long, science-y definition of the metal that I’m not going to type out here because I’m feeling lazy. This leads to half a page of words iron- as a prefix, including ironclad, iron lung, and ironware. There’s also iron curtain, which is not just the famous one, but any “political, military, and ideological that isolates an area.”
Once again we ask how to define the undefinable. In this case, irony. The dictionary says it’s “the use of words to describe the opposite of what one really means,” and “incongruity between the actual result of a sequence or events and the expected results.” I hopped over to Wikipedia, who calls irony “a juxtaposition of what, on the surface, appears to be the case with what is actually or expected to be the case.” It then goes on and on, with types, grades, and modes of irony, before getting into rhetoric and postmodernism. Is it ironic that I can’t think of a good “it’s so ironic” joke to end this paragraph?
Here’s a new one: isinglass isn’t glass at all, but “a gelatin obtained from various fish.” One of the dictionary editors got that zoology degree, and they’re determined to use it.
There’s a lot of space devoted to it, starting with “that one – used of a lifeless thing, a plant, a person, or an animal, or an abstract entity,” and then getting even more technical with “used as a subject of an impersonal verb that expresses a condition or action without reference to an agent.” If you say so. The next definition gets playful “the player in a game who performs the principal action of the game.”
The letter I comes a conclusion with ivy, “a trailing woody evergreen vine with small black berries that is related to ginseng,” followed by IWW, “International Workers of the World.” This mismatch of subjects is a good representation of how the I section has been such a mismatched assortment of words.
Next: Just kidding!
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