FAIRBANKS - “Words are chameleons which reflect the color of their environment,” according to Learned Hand, one of the greatest American legal writers.

Sometimes words are so unusual they fall on uncomprehendingly deaf ears, which leads listeners to suspect the speaker’s a high-faluting show-off. Well-read people can easily and innocently fall into this trap.

Some odd words are amusing in their own right. Check out “Cool and Obscure Words” www.ewanco.com/~eje/lexicon.html that an “embedded software development engineer” named Eric Ewanco culled “verbatim from two lexica: “Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words” and “Weird Words,” both of which I happen to own, and from A.Word.A.Day http://wordsmith.org, which sends interesting words to my e-mail address.

Ewanco provides such gems as “agastopia (admiration of a particular part of someone’s body),” “agowilt (sickening or sudden fear),” and “absquantulate (leave hurriedly suddenly, or secretely),” as in “I absquantulated the party before my agastopian-driven agowilt grew too great.”

Sometimes words not meant to be read make sense.

“Lorem Ipsum,” for example, is “dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry,” according to “Lorem Ipsum — All the Facts” www.lipsum.com.

Lorem Ipsum was created by an anonymous printer in the 1500s who scrambled an existing galley page of type to quickly make a book about type designs that allowed viewers to study the type designs without getting caught up in reading the text.

Many Lorem Ipsum generator Web sites exist to provide downloads of the dummy text for graphic designers who want viewers’ to focus on proposed Web page layouts and design features.

The Lorem Ipsum passage was long thought to be pure nonsense but was actually a garbled version of Cicero’s 45 BC essay “The Extremes of Good and Evil.” Richard McClintock, a Latin professor from Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, traced it using an obscure Latin word in “lorem ipsum,” “consectetur,” that also was used by Cicero, whose name meant “chickpea,” in his essay.

“Lorem Ipsum” comes from a line that reads in the original unscrambled version, “Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisci velit,” and means “There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.”

Some go to extremes to avoid pain, including Peter Roget, a handsome, intelligent Victorian medical man with a strong streak of mental illness in his family. “Madness did not just run in his family, the New York Times noted in 2008, “it galloped, sped, sprinted, dashed and made haste.”

He “married late and was widowed early,” his grandmother was schizophrenic, his mother was severely depressed and manipulative, his sister and daughter suffered major nervous breakdowns, and there was “the grief-stricken, throat-slashing suicide of his uncle, the great British civil libertarian Samuel Romilly, who expired in Roget’s blood-soaked arms.”

As a boy, Roget found making lists of words helped him cope. Still, he was “humorless and judgmental, beset with a paranoid streak as well as melancholy and shyness, not to mention a horror of dirt and disorder.” This didn’t set well with his job as a doctor in the grimy Manchester hospital at the height of the Dickensian Industrial Revolution, so “he took nighttime refuge in composing the synonymic word lists that more than 40 years later finally blossomed into the thesaurus.”

Roget completed the first thesaurus in 1852, in his 70s. It was an immediate and enormous success, and he continued revising and expanding it into his 90s.

Now, “The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary” has arrived. Started in 1965, this mega-thesaurus was finally completed last year. Containing 800,000 meanings for 600,000 words organized into 230,000 categories and subcategories, it’s twice as big as the current “Roget’s” and the critical reviews have been outstanding.

The “first historical thesaurus in any language,” the HTOED lists all English words since Old English, and gives the first and last recorded use of each. It’s a browser’s delight but retails for $395, which makes for expensive serendipity.

Fortunately, we all own the public library’s copy and can read it there any time. After all, Roget coined “thesaurus” from the Greek word “thesauros,” meaning “treasury, storehouse,” which neatly describes our library.

Greg Hill is director of North Star Borough libraries.