If you had to take a guess at the 10 least-used letters of the English alphabet, chances are you wouldn’t rank B down among the Zs, Qs, Xs, and Js. And on the one hand, you’d be quite right—nearly 5% of all the words in a dictionary are listed under the second letter of the alphabet. But when B isn’t the first letter of a word, it’s actually quite rare: take an average page of written English text, and you can expect it to account for less than 1.5% of it, making B the seventh least-used English letter overall. So why not give B a boost with these brilliantly bizarre words?

1. BABBITTISM

Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis’s controversial 1922 satire Babbitt tells the story of fictional Midwest businessman George F. Babbitt, who achieves the perfect American middle-class life but soon finds total conformity and Dictionary of Word Ori... John Ayto Best Price: $6.67 Buy New $10.65 (as of 05:55 UTC - Details) social expectation oddly discomforting. The novel inspired a handful of words that have since entered the language including Babbittism or Babbittry, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “materialistic complacency and unthinking conformity.”

2. BABBLATIVE

If you’re babblative, then you’re prone to babble or chatter. Likewise, babblement or babblery is gossiping, prattling conversation, while a babble-merchant is an unstoppably talkative person.

3. BACK-DOUBLE

Why Do We Say? The Sto... Castle Books Best Price: $0.10 Buy New $5.00 (as of 06:15 UTC - Details) Because it’s usually a less direct route, any side road or backstreet can also be called a back-double.

4. BACKSPANG

Derived from spang, an old Scots word for a sudden jolt or kick, a backspang is essentially a sting in the tail—a bad turn of events or a sudden detrimental change of mind at the very last minute. It’s used in relation to someone going back on their word, after a deal has been struck.

5. BAFFLEGAB

Mo’ Urban Dictio... urbandictionary.com Best Price: $1.23 Buy New $12.57 (as of 04:25 UTC - Details) Jargon-filled talk that sets out to clarify something but ends up only confusing things? That’s bafflegab.

6. BAGGAGE-SMASHER

As well as being a name for a thief who specializes in stealing luggage from trains, in 19th-century slang a baggage-smasher was a porter at a railway station.

7. BAGGAGERY

A 16th-century word for the hoi polloi or rabble.

Urban Dictionary: Fres... Peckham, Aaron Best Price: $1.99 Buy New $4.68 (as of 03:05 UTC - Details) 8. BAHUVRIHI

In linguistics, a bahuvrihi is essentially a compound word in which the first part (A) describes the second (B), so that, according to Merriam-Webster, the entire word (A + B) fits the template “a B that is A.” Words like highbrow, white-collar, Bluebeard, Bigfoot, and sabretoothare all examples, as is the word bahuvrihi itself: it literally means “much rice” in Sanskrit, but is used as a nickname for a notably wealthy man.

9. BAISEMAIN

That courtly display of kissing someone’s hand on meeting them is called a baisemain.

10. BALATROON

A 17th-century word—derived from the Latin for “to prattle”—for a foolish or nonsensical person.

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