A bibliophile is a person who loves or collects books, as Merriam-Webster defines it. Below are 35 more words and expressions that every book lover should know, sorted into people, kinds of literature, characters, and other literary terms.
If you read the first lines of this post, you have already learned a new word for "book lover". But there are many more terms that bookworms, bibliophiles, and passionate readers should add to their vocabulary.
People
- Bibliobibuli: people who read too much.
- Biblioclast: a person who destroys or mutilates books.
- Bibliognost: a person with an extensive knowledge of books.
- Biblioklept: a person who steals books.
- Bibliophagist: a person who reads a lot (literally, a book eater: someone who devours books).
- Bibliotaph: a person who hoards books and hides them away.
- Book-bosomed: describes a person who never leaves the house without a book.
- Librocubicularist: a person who reads in bed.
- Literarian: a person who is well read in literature.
- Morosoph: a learned fool, often someone who talks at length about things they do not understand.
- Ultracrepidarian: a person who criticizes, gives advice on, or judges topics they know almost nothing about.
Rhetorical devices and kinds of literature
- Amphigouri: a piece of nonsense verse or writing, often a parody, that sounds meaningful but makes no sense.
- Aphorism: a short, concise statement of a general truth or idea.
- Bildungsroman: a novel about a young person's coming of age; the word comes from German.
- Clerihew: a humorous four-line poem about a person, with the rhyme scheme AABB; named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley.
- Epistolary novel: a novel told through letters, diary entries, documents, and other kinds of correspondence.
- Fascicle: one part of a book that is published in installments.
- Hamartia: the error or flaw of a story's hero that leads to their downfall.
- Incunable: a book printed in Europe before 1501, in the earliest days of printing with movable type.
- In medias res: a way of beginning a story in the middle of the action, with the background revealed later, for example in flashbacks.
- Malapropism: the mistaken use of a word that sounds like the right one, often with a funny result; named after Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Rivals.
- Roman à clef: a novel about real people and events, disguised as fiction.
- Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole, or the whole for a part, as in all hands on deck for all the sailors.
- Unreliable narrator: a narrator whose account cannot be trusted, so that the reader sees events the way the narrator wants them seen, not the way they happened in the story.
Literary characters
- Byronic hero: a protagonist who is flawed, moody, and often self-destructive, and who isolates himself from the world; named after the poet Lord Byron and the heroes of his works.
- Deuteragonist: the second most important character in a book or story.
- Foil: a secondary character whose contrast with the protagonist brings out the protagonist's traits.
- Protagonist: the main character in a book or story.
Other literary terms
- Bibliolatry: an excessive devotion to a book or to books in general; originally the worship of the Bible.
- Bowdlerize: to remove the parts of a text that someone considers offensive, often leaving it weaker; named after Thomas Bowdler, who published a cleaned-up edition of Shakespeare.
- Death of the author: the idea, from an essay by the French critic Roland Barthes, that a text should be interpreted without regard to the author's intentions.
- Epeolatry: the worship of words.
- Finifugal: hating endings and trying to put off the end of a book, a film, or anything else.
- Libricide: the destruction of books.
- Tsundoku: buying books and letting them pile up without reading them; the word comes from Japanese.
If you recognize yourself in a few of these words, you are in good company. For words that are simply strange, see 15 crazy and weird words in the English dictionary, and for more reasons to collect new words, read why it is important to expand your vocabulary.