What is a bumbershoot? Or a moonbow? And what does it mean when someone absquatulates? Find out all this and more in the Dictionary of Difficult Words. Test your knowledge with more than 400 words to amaze, confuse, and inspire budding wordsmiths (and adults). All of the words featured in this book are difficult to spell, hard to say, and their meanings are obscure to most children (and most adults)! Written with simple, easy-to-understand definitions by lexicographer Jane Solomon, this dictionary celebrates the beauty of the English language for family trivia time spent around the printed page.

Jane Solomon spends her days writing definitions and working on various projects for Dictionary.com. She’s a member of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, the group that decides what new emoji pop up on our devices. You can find her online at lexicalitems.com and at the Twitter handle @janesolomon. She is based in Oakland.

Tyler Schnoebelen (@TSchnoebelen) is principal product manager at integrate.ai. Prior to joining integrate, Tyler ran product management at Machine Zone and before that, founded an NLP company, Idibon. He holds a PhD in linguistics from Stanford and a BA in English from Yale. Tyler’s insights on language have been featured in places like the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Time, The Atlantic, NPR, and CNN. He’s also a tiny character in a movie about emoji and a novel about fairies.