What are beastly words?

Beastly words are rare words that have so much personality they’ve come to life as creatures. They all started out as regular words printed in the dictionary and said out loud every once in a while, but they just had too much life in them to stay trapped on a page. Now they're embodied and loose in the wild, but they still look and act like the words they evolved from.

Are these real words?

Yes! All beastly words evolved from real words that have been recorded in a dictionary, but some are easier to track down than others. The "less endangered" words can be found on sites like dictionary.com or in a common printed dictionary, but the more obscure, endangered words are usually hiding in the giant, dusty old dictionaries in large libraries, or on Merriam-Webster Unabridged Online Dictionary or Oxford English Dictionary Online.

Is this for kids or adults?

Beastly words is for word lovers of all ages because logophiles come in all shapes and sizes.

... well, I guess it's not for the kind of adults who think stuff like this is only for kids, but I don't know anyone like that, do you?

Why are beastly words endangered?

Just like endangered animals, beastly words face a variety of threats. Sometimes people are scared of them because they’re so big or unusual (but they’re not dangerous unless you mistreat them). Others think they just take up too much space. Their biggest threat, though, is apathy—the most fearsome predator of all.

Protecting beastly words is simple and fun: all we have to do to is learn their names and use them! The more we notice them, talk about them, and write about them, the stronger they become!

What is the "endangered beasties meter"?

The endangered beasties meter shows how "at risk" a particular beastly word is of disappearing: is it merely rare (aka "near threatened") or has it fallen out of use entirely, lingering only in a few aging books and brains (aka "extinct in the wild")?