Nyctograph

In 1891, the writer Lewis Carroll invented the nyctograph, a device consisting of a flat board with a series of squares cut into it that could be used, letter by letter, to guide his pen as he wrote in the dark. Carroll even invented an encrypted alphabet just for the purpose: “I tried rows of square holes,” he wrote, “but the letters were still apt to be illegible. Then I said to myself, ‘Why not invent a square alphabet, using only dots at the corners, and lines along the sides?’” Carroll kept the device inside a notebook in his bed. “If I wake and think of something I wish to record,” he later explained, “[I] draw from under the pillow a small memorandum book containing my nyctograph, write a few lines, or even a few pages . . . replace the book, and go to sleep again.”

Oaf-rocked

From Yorkshire dialect, meaning ‘weak as an adult due to a sheltered or pampered childhood’. Oaf here is either a corruption of ‘half’ (in the sense that a weak adult was only ‘half-rocked’, or improperly cared for as a child), or ‘elf ’ (derived from an old piece of folklore that claims elves would steal human children and replace them with their own ‘changelings’). Also from the dialect a ‘Yorkshire mile’: ‘a proverbially long distance’.

Proditomania

The irrational belief that everyone around you is a traitor; the unnerving feeling that you’re surrounded by people out to get you. Coined in the late 1800s, it derives from the Latin verb ‘prodere’, meaning ‘to betray’ – as do the likes of ‘prodition’ (a 15th-Century word for treason or treachery), ‘proditor’ (a traitor) and ‘proditorious’ (an adjective describing traitorous or perdious actions, or someone liable to give away secrets).

Quinie

Long before it came to be attached to money, a coin was originally a block forming the corner of a building, or else one of the wedge-shaped stones forming part of an archway. Coign or quoin is still an architectural term – used to refer to angles or corners, or to the cornerstones and keystones, of buildings. And from quoin came ‘quinie’, a dialect word for a cornerstone, or the first stone laid in erecting buildings.

Raven-messenger

According to the Book of Genesis, the raven was the first animal released from Noah’s Ark after the Great Flood. Although accounts of the story differ, the raven is typically said not to have returned to Noah immediately, but instead ‘went forth to and fro until the waters were dried up from off the earth’. When the raven failed to return, Noah released a dove, which flew back to the Ark with an olive leaf in its bill to show that the floodwaters had finally abated. This episode is the origin of ‘raven-messenger’, an ancient expression referring to someone – and, in particular, someone bearing news or an important message – who does not return when required, or arrives too late to be of any use.