n. The words and phrases that comprise a person's vocabulary.
2012
wordrobe — a blend of "word" and "wardrobe", this term refers to one's personal lexicon.
1997
wordrobe: A person's lingo.
EXAMPLE: Shermie is a skater—as if you couldn't tell by his wordrobe.
Where heard: I made it up and I thought it was clever, so I hope everyone will use it now.
EXAMPLE: Shermie is a skater—as if you couldn't tell by his wordrobe.
Where heard: I made it up and I thought it was clever, so I hope everyone will use it now.
1996 (earliest)
Maybe the Neologic Nellies can solve the problem. These are the people who go about coining words and waiting for them to become part of the language; when they don’t, the Neologic Nellies send them to me and wonder what's wrong with the rest of the world.
Wordrobe, for example, coined by June Gundersen of Brooklyn in 1984, meaning "the vocabulary with which we cloak our emotions."
Wordrobe, for example, coined by June Gundersen of Brooklyn in 1984, meaning "the vocabulary with which we cloak our emotions."
Wordrobe is a blend of word and wardrobe, "a person's stock of wearing apparel." The latter also means "a room in which wearing apparel is kept," and in that sense it comes from the Old French word garderobe (garder, "to keep" + robe). The word robe goes back to the Vulgar Latin rauba, "clothes taken away as booty," which also morphed into the word rob, "to steal." The source of all these words is the Indo-European root reup-, "to snatch," from which we also get rip, "to tear," which dovetails nicely with the modern phrase "rip off." Perhaps, then, we can bring things full circle by "tailoring" a new addition to our wordrobe: wordrip, "to plagiarize."