2015-09-06
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These words stand close to "learned" words, particularly to modes of poetic diction. Learned words and archaisms are both associated with the printed page. Yet, many learned words may also be used in conversational situations. This cannot happen with archaisms, which are invariably restricted to the printed page. These words are moribund, already partly or fully out of circulation, rejected by the living language. Their last refuge is in historical novels (whose authors use them to create a particular period atmosphere) and, of course, in poetry which is rather conservative in its choice of words.
Examples of archaisms are: morn (for morning),eve (for evening), moon (for month), damsel (for girl), errant (for wandering, e.g., errant knights) etc. Sometimes, an archaic word may undergo a sudden revival. So, the formerly archaic kin (for relatives; one's family) is now current in American usage.
The terms "archaic" and "obsolete" are used more or less indiscriminately by some authors. Others make a distinction between them using the term "obsolete" for words which have completely gone out of use. The Random House Dictionary defines an obsolete word as one "no longer in use, esp. out of use for at least a century", whereas an archaism is referred to as "current in an earlier tune but rare in present usage".
There is a further term for words which are no longer in use: historisms. By this we mean words denoting objects and phenomena which are things of the past and no longer exist.
Professionalisms.
ProfessionalTenninology
Hundreds of thousands of words belong to special scientific, professional or trade terminological systems and are not used or even understood by people outside the particular speciality. Every field of modern activity has its specialized vocabulary. There is a special medical vocabulary, and similarly special terminologies for Psychology, Botany, Music, Linguistics, Teaching Methods and many others.
Term is a word or a word-group which is specifically employed by a particular branch of science, technology, trade or the arts to convey a notion peculiar to this particular activity. So, bilingual, interdental, labialization, palatalization, glottal stop, descending scale are terms of Theoretical Phonetics.
