10 unusual words in Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar

1. Shantung (I wore a black shantung sheath that cost me forty dollars.) A fabric in plain weave having a slightly irregular surface due to uneven slubbed filling yarns .

2. Villanelles ( ... and sat back enjoying the bright lights and the colored fires and wrote page after page of villanelles and sonnets.) A chiefly French verse form running on two rhymes and consisting typically of five tercets and a quatrain in which the first and third lines of the opening tercet recur alternately at the end of the other tercets and together as the last two lines of the quatrain.

3. Victrola (Well, for about an hour we lounged on Constantin's balcony in two separate slingback chairs with the victrola playing and the balalaika records stacked between us.) Tradename, used for a phonograph or record player.

4. Psychosomatic (He was very proud of his perfect health and was always telling me it was psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn't breathe.) Caused by mental or emotional problems rather than by physical illness.

5. Dybbuk (The night before I'd seen a play where the heroine was possessed by a dybbuk,

and when the dybbuk spoke from her mouth its voice sounded so cavernous and deep you couldn't tell whether it was a man or a woman.) A wandering soul believed in Jewish folklore to enter and control a living body until exorcised by a religious rite.

6. Screak (The soprano screak of carriage wheels punished my ear.) A harsh shrill noise.
7. Corrasable Bond (I counted out three hundred and fifty sheets of corrasable bond from my mother's stock in the hall closet, ...) A trademarked name for a brand of erasable typing paper.

8. Bosky (A big white swan full of little children approached my bench, then turned around a bosky islet covered with ducks and paddled back under the dark arch of the bridge.) Having abundant trees or shrubs; of or relating to a woods.

9. Factitious ("Factitious!" my creative writing professor at college scrawled on a story of mine called "The Big Weekend.") Formed by or adapted to an artificial or conventional standard.

10. Pablum (I smelt a mingling of Pablum and sour milk and salt-cod-stinky diapers and felt sorrowful and tender.) A trademark for an infant cereal (1932).