Words du Jour

Here are some interesting words I came across recently:

Invidious: tending to cause discontent, animosity or envy.
Forsooth: in truth.
Portmanteau: a word or morpheme whose form and meaning are derived from a blending of two or more distinct forms (as smog from smoke and fog).
Morpheme: A distinctive collocation of phonemes having no smaller meaningful parts.
Phoneme: any of the abstract units of the phonetic system of a language that correspond to a set of similar speech sounds which are perceived to be a single distinctive sound in the language.
Zeitgeber: an environmental agent or event (as the occurence of light or dark) that provides the stimulus setting or resetting a biological clock of an organism.
Dreadnought: one that is among the largest or most powerful of its kind.
Disclimax: a relatively stable ecological community often including kinds of organisms foreign to the region and displacing the climax because of disturbance especially by man.