Studying literature, especially older literature, often means coming across words you aren't familiar with. I jot these words just inside the covers of the books I'm reading, and all-too-often forget to look them up later--which has led to a massive backlog of interesting words whose meanings I don't know.
One regular feature of Nifty Rictus will be a Vocablog--a chance to look back over these words and find out what they mean. There are plenty of "Word of the Day" Internet modules out there, but in my experience they tend to generate words that are either too basic ("deluge") or too esoteric ("zooxanthellae")--you get the sense that people are pulling the words from dictionaries and science textbooks, not from actual usage. The Vocablog will try to steer a happy medium between these two extremes, focusing on unusual words that are usable by virtue of having actually been used at some point in the not-so-distant past.
