I’m working on an analysis of the vocabulary of members of Congress. This effort has already spun off a number of interesting byproducts, which I’ll be sharing over the next week or so. The first is what one might call a “Congresswhack”, if one were familiar with Googlewhacking (a two-word Google query that produces only one result.)

The analysis use two primary data sources: a list of 5,372 “SAT Words” obtained from freevocabulary.com and majortests.com, and Congressional word-mention data from Capitol Words. Capitol Words scrapes the Congressional Record (the “official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress”) on a daily basis, and calculates word or phrase usage over time, by legislator, by party, and so on. They also offer the Capitol Words API, which is what I used for my analysis.

So, without further ado, here are your words of the day. Each of these words has been said on the record once since 1996:

50 words said only once since 1996, by a Republican:
acerbity, Achillean, anagram, antonym, astringent, betrothal, boorishness, chromatic, consignor, contumacious, cynosure, deviltry, diaphanous, diffusible, discomfit, doublet, exegesis, fishmonger, habitant, heptagon, homologous, homonym, ichthyology, impetuosity, kinsfolk, knead, languor, mealymouthed, mettlesome, ministration, necrology, negligee, occlude, panegyric, pommel, precipitant, preponderate, protuberant, ramify, resistive, ruffian, sedulous, sinuosity, somnolent, superfluity, testator, theism, transfigure, upbraid, vegetate

50 words said only once since 1996, by a Democrat:
dowager, churlish, lithe, peevishness, soporific, ambidextrous, apposition, arboriculture, Arthurian, bedeck, brooch, cajolery, Calvinism, cauterize, coquette, cosmopolitanism, darkling, dentifrice, desiccant, encamp, fondle, foppish, frizz, furrier, garrote, imbibe, impecunious, lexicography, luxuriant, lyre, mawkish, mendicant, messieurs, noisome, obtrude, pertinacity, photoelectric, piteous, poesy, precession, protuberance, pungency, recrudescence, repine, retch, sapient, secant, swarthy, syllabication, volant

Related posts:

• Interactive map of the breadth of vocabulary of each member of the House of Representatives.
• Words with Senators: Ranking the Vocab of Each Senator