In music, this type of “leaning” grace note clashes with the melody just enough to create dissonance, then sweet resolution. It is famous for its capacity to give you goosebumps: Imagine Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, or the opening of Adele’s “Someone Like You.”

Derived from an Italian verb meaning “to lean,” the word is rooted in the Greek morpheme “pod,” meaning “feet,” along with podium, pedestal and podiatrist — providers of support.

Hundreds of Italian loanwords exist in English, especially apropos (another loanword, from French!) of “high arts” like music and cuisine, fields tending to conserve their original terminology. “If you want to study the works of the master, you have to speak the language of the masters,” explained the lexicographer Kory Stamper.

This term was the Scripps National Spelling Bee’s winning word in 2005, clinched by 13-year-old Anurag Kashyap, who reported feeling “just pure happiness” when he recited that victorious final “a” — tension, then release.

In the early 1990s, the British psychologist John Sloboda asked music aficionados to think of their favorite tear-jerking musical moments. Out of the 20 identified phrases, 18 featured an appoggiatura.

The adjective form of a nonsense noun meaning “utopia,” this whimsical term is a partial anagram of “nowhere.”

It appears in the title of an 1872 novel by Samuel Butler. Satirizing Victorian society, the British author concocted the word to describe a fantasyland that deifies physical health and treats illness as a criminal offense.

The word trickled from literary obscurity into the “popular” lexicon thanks in large part to the cult-followed Southern California grocery chain of the same name, which first opened as a quaint solo boutique in 1966 and gained notoriety for its $22 almond butter and “Hailey Bieber Smoothie.”

What might cause a niche fictional reference to become a “real” word? Frequently, it’s when the term “speaks to a pocket of experience that people were previously missing from the language,” said Yee-Lum Mak, a rhetoric scholar and the author of “Other-Wordly.”

Not every corner of American culture thirsts for an expression meaning “wellness utopia,” but for a certain dialect of Los Angeles English, “erewhonian” satisfies a lexical gap.

This adjective connoting foxiness emerged in its modern form in the early 17th century by way of sundry Latin variations — “vulpinus,” “vulpes,” “volpes” — all relating to the mammal or its cunning qualities.

Its Latin root “vulpes” describes the “true fox” genus in binomial nomenclature, the taxonomy system invented by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1753.

Many early books about biology and medicine were written in Latin. Much of that terminology has been preserved (think of terms like “larva” or “rhinoplasty”), which is why scientists sometimes sound like they’re speaking a foreign language: They actually are.

This word might remind you of the Pokémon character Vulpix, a squash-hued fox with a bushy tail and fiery superpowers.

And if you’re a fan of The New York Times’s own Spelling Bee, you may remember “vulpine” as the pangram from April 23, 2023!

To the astronomer, it’s when three or more celestial bodies configure in a perfect line (the Earth, Sun and moon during a solar eclipse, for example). But to the poet, it describes either a kind of consonant repetition or rhythmic fusion.

The shortest English word to feature three y’s, it is most likely a compound of the Greek prefix “syn,” meaning “together with,” and “zygon,” meaning “yoke.”

Also descending from “zygon” are “zygote,” the product of two reproductive cells coming together, and “zygomatic bone,” a.k.a. the cheekbone.

The word comes up in pop culture with surprising frequency. You might recognize it from the title of a 1996 episode of “The X-Files,” or from the effusive opening number of the musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”

But among top spellers, “syzygy” is beloved for its particularity: It’s one of those singular English words that’s almost impossible to spell if you don’t already know it.

Defined by Merriam-Webster as “careless handwriting: a crude or illegible scrawl,” this word is a semantic cousin of “graffiti.”

Entering English via the French verb “griffonner,” meaning “to scrawl,” its Middle French ancestors included “grifouner” (to scribble), “griffon” (stylus) and the suffix “-age” (meaning “the act of,” as in “tutelage” or “sabotage”).

“This word makes me think of a griffon trying to hold a pen and having a hard time,” said Ms. Mak, referring to the Greek mythological creature with an eagle’s head and wings and the body of a lion. The two terms may not be entirely unrelated: “Griffe” is the French word for “claw,” and writing your ABC’s with talons does sound tricky.

Still, charming as the word itself may seem, griffonage can be deadly.

A 2018 Johns Hopkins University study found that medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the United States, and both physicians and ethics researchers have suggested that doctors’ notoriously illegible handwriting may contribute.

“This is a fun example of a word that accurately describes itself,” said Evan O’Dorney, a one-time Scripps champ. It’s a piece of zany made-up language whose definition is literally “zany made-up language,” a nonsense word that means “nonsense words.”

Lewis Carroll invented the term for his 1871 novel “Through the Looking-Glass.” In all its polysyllabic whimsy, it appears in a poem within a dream about a fearsome, serpentine beast.

This is technically a nonce word: a lexical item invented for one-time, special-occasion use (and which may or may not eventually take a seat at the table of everyday English).

Carroll’s nonce legacy is illustrious. In addition to this word, we also have him to thank for coining “bandersnatch,” “snark” and “chortle.”

“Jabberwocky” enjoyed a pop culture renaissance in 2008, thanks to the Jabbawockeez, a San Diego hip-hop group that won the first season of “America’s Best Dance Crew.”

There’s something about this playful term that seems to suggest its definition: a jumbled mixture. Synonyms include ragbag and mishmash.

Its earlier variations referred specifically to food: a stew consisting of meat, vegetables and other miscellaneous ingredients. One Medieval recipe called for chopped goose, wine, water, onions and herbs.

In Middle English, the word was spelled “hochepoche,” derived from the root “hotch” meaning “to shake.” Its related predecessors include the Old French “hochepot” and the Middle Dutch “hutspot,” all motley soups and stews.

“Hodgepodge” is also closely related to a legal term that dates back to the 13th century and frequently comes up when handling wills, trusts and divorces.

“Hotchpot,” meaning “mixture of property,” is the process of combining and redistributing properties so all the beneficiaries receive their fair share.

A flamboyant style of art and decoration, born of the 17th century’s French Baroque movement (think: Louis XIV’s Versailles), but incorporating more asymmetry and a softer, pastel-leaning palette.

The word looks Italian, but it actually comes from the French “rocaille,” which means “rock” or “shell” and describes the lavish pebblework that was used (to excess, some might argue) throughout Europe in the 1700s.

Since the 19th century, English conversationalists have used the term to mean “dated” or “out of fashion,” its humorous phonetic bounce poking fun at the bygone aesthetic’s gaudiness.

It appears in the title and chorus of a 2010 Arcade Fire song, preceded by the lyrics “Let’s go downtown and watch the modern kids … Using great big words that they don’t understand.”

The artist Yvette Mayorga revisited the movement for her first solo museum exhibition, “What a Time to be,” using pink frosting to, as the art historian Emmanuel Ortega put it, “decolonize rococo.”

A verb meaning to produce a long, oscillating cry that can signal a range of powerful emotions, from grief to ecstasy.

Much like an onomatopoeia, this is a word whose sound reflects its content. “It’s one of those great imitative terms in English, like “tintinnabulation” (a tinkling sound) and “borborygmus” (an intestinal gurgle),” said Ms. Stamper.

The vocalization features in cultural celebrations across the world, including Mizrahi Jewish henna ceremonies, Hindu temple rituals and weddings in the Middle East and North Africa, where it’s usually produced by women in the form of a high-pitched, joyous “Lililili!”

It also appears as a hunting signal in the 1954 novel “Lord of the Flies,” and as a spine-chilling war cry in the 1962 film “Lawrence of Arabia.”

And in 2022, when Morocco’s men’s soccer team made it to the World Cup semifinals, you could hear people rapturously ululate from the streets of Casablanca to the stadium in Qatar.

From the Yiddish term for “wooden block,” this word was brought to the U.S. in the mid-20th century and became American slang, along with other delightful loanwords including “schmuck,” “schlep,” “putz,” “mensch” and “oy vey.”

The Center for Applied Linguistics estimates that, before the Holocaust, about 11 million people spoke Yiddish worldwide. Now, fewer than a million people do, a tiny fraction of them as their native tongue.

Plosive and monosyllabic, this term is phonetically as fun to say as a curse word. And though it’s technically an insult for a clumsy person (a kind of “blockhead”), it’s more endearing than vulgar.

Children of the 1990s may fondly recall the publishing company named after this word, which paired colorful crafts with spiral-bound how-to books on topics as varied as cat’s cradle and sorcery.

As bee words go, “klutz” is pretty mainstream. But in general, K-words are some of the hardest to spell, according to competitors. “In our experience, the G’s, K’s and M’s have the highest concentration of zingers,” said Evan O’Dorney, the 2007 Scripps champion.