I recently discovered Save The Words, an effort (actually, just an ad campaign) by the Oxford Dictionary to rescue obscure English words in danger of extinction. How? The website lets you “adopt” a word and pledge to rescue it. Imagine my joy when I saw all those new words calling out to me like cute puppies at the pound! I didn’t know which to pick!
So I adopted the first word that caught my eye: jussulent, meaning “full of broth or soup”. This unusually specific adjective doesn’t even appear in any major online dictionaries. But it is listed at The Phrontistery’s catalog of lost words, which says that jussulent lived from 1656 to 1658.
In trying to discover its origins, I learned that jus is French for “juice”. That led me to the entry for juice in the Online Etymology Dictionary, which explains that jus was also a Latin word for “broth”. So there you have it. This isn’t such a strange word, after all.
Now, can you give me one good reason why jussulent should be extinct? Unlike the term ten cent store, which is also up for adoption, jussulent refers to something that still exists. And I can assure you that soup will always exist. Some may argue that this adjective is too specific to be of much use, but how is it any different from words like cruciverbalist (