bitful

Perilous; dangerous. Dangerously cunning (obsolete).

A person's specific area of interest, skill, or authority. See synonyms at field. The office or district of a bailiff.

A group of animals or birds, especially larks or quail. A group or an assemblage.

A friend sent me this notice he found posted at his gym, which I don't think it's even one of the gayest in town.
You go to a gym? Then you are expected to be supple enough to soap your own back.
Otherwise, they will preserve it as inappropriate behaviour. Preserve, regard, same thing…

I am leaving on Thursday morning for five days in Spain, and along with scouring the city to get myself a good stock of cheap SPF50 lotion, I've been finding three new ways to revise and improve my Spanish (last time I only Michel Thomassed myself until my ears were bleeding in Spanish):

Marina and Ben's [...]

Dr B.'s parents are coming down from Staffordshire tonight, then tomorrow morning the four of us are hopping onto the Eurostar and spending the next forty-eight hours in Paris.
He has organised this as a present for his dad's birthday, and getting his mother to come along took some planning and presentation skills, as in the [...]

Back-seat screwdriver: a person giving advice to someone assembling furniture.
Origin: Dr B., the other day, as he politely discarded my unsolicited advice while he was painstakingly putting together three new tall Ikea chests of drawers for our bedroom.

I love words. Words make life sweeter.

I wish I knew every word. Unfortunately, I don't. I am told I do a pretty good job at using an extensive vocabulary for someone whose first language is not English, but I get extremely frustrated whenever I encounter a word I do not know.

So I usually make a note of it, then look it up - but very often forget what it means, unless I use it shortly afterwards. Sadly, with age this happens more and more often.

I recently noticed that I look up on average a word a day. That's when I thought I could put this website to good use and post them here.

A few points:

• some of the words you will see might look very ordinary to you. As I said, keep in mind that English is not my first language. Sometimes these are words I have never heard before, or everyday words I cannot get into my head;
• most of the definitions are taken from the Answers.com website. This is because I find the descriptions concise yet complete. They also have very nice semantic URLs that enable me to write handy scripts to code this section of the website;
• if you access bitful via an RSS feed reader, you will not see the Word of the Day. However, if you are interested, you can subscribe to the Word of the Day feed or bookmark the Word of the Day page;
• contrary to what the timestamp says, I do not get up in the middle of the night to publish. I'm a bit of a cheat: I do it all in advance and make it magically appear when I am in fact (most nights) sleeping.

I hope you enjoy flexing your vocabulary as much as I do.