Last week, I received this beautiful zine in the mail. Listing 384 words related to smell that are both literal (lemony, briny, chemical) and metaphoric (hormonal, sleepy, gummy), the zine is an argument against the notion that smell is a sense for which language is limited. I love the concept of this project as well as the artifact itself. Created by Aubrey Gurtovenko and Noele Lusano, the limited edition zine is distributed by Ex Libris Odoratis, a small press publishing chapbooks, zines, and ephemera that celebrate our sense of smell.
Smell Words also reminded me of a project I came upon in the early 2000’s: Sal Randolph’s Free Words. Now the name of Randolph’s weekly Substack, the Free Words of my memory was a project compiling 13,000 words to use as you wish, the full text of which has been placed in the public domain. “FREE WORDS is a book that belongs to everyone who finds it,” the archived website says. The full text is still available online and as a free PDF.
Inspired by the project, I’ve been compiling word banks of my own ever since, collecting words that I want to hold onto because they are beautiful or strange or in some way notable. I love these type of lists, where words exist without context—where the full, independent pleasure of their sounds (their roundness or sharpness, their consonants and vowels) can be admired.
These word banks also figure into a writing exercise that I like to share with students—sometimes as a generative prompt, and sometimes as a revision tool.
Writing Prompt
The instructions are simple: you are given a word bank and asked to incorporate a certain number of words from it into a poem, essay, or story you’re working on. If you are still actively writing the piece, consult the word bank at points when you feel stuck or the writing is feeling stale. If you are revising a piece, identify moments that you feel are lacking energy and rework them to include a word of your choosing from the word bank.
How you choose words from the list is up to you: you might close your eyes and point your finger, imposing a creative challenge on yourself to use whatever word you land on. Or you might skim over the list, searching for something that resonates. Either way, the idea is to allow language to surprise you; it might help illuminate something you were already trying to achieve, or it might lead you down an entirely different trail.
My word bank (just over 1,000 words) is available as text or downloadable PDF. Much like Free Words, it is free for anyone to use for any purpose. Feel free to save and share. And if you know of any similar projects out there, let me know!