Every other list of old-fashioned English words is somebody’s personal selection. This one is a count. The 21 words below are the vocabulary that period drama uses far more heavily than the rest of television does, and the list is what the measurement returned rather than what anyone thought ought to be on it. Eleven shows in the catalogue lean on this register; the lines quoted beside the words are taken from three of them, Game of Thrones, Spartacus and Bridgerton.

It is written for a learner who already speaks English and keeps running into a layer of the language that ordinary conversation never touches. These are not words for daily speech, and nothing here is worth working into your next email. You meet them in older novels, in translated classics, in ceremony and formal address, and in exactly this kind of television. Being able to read them is the point. Being able to say them is not, and using several of them in one sentence will make you sound like a character rather than a person.

One thing worth saying before the list, because it explains the list. Nobody in the fifteenth century spoke like this either. The English of period drama is a modern screenwriter’s convention for sounding old, assembled out of a few real archaisms, some inverted word order and a general refusal to use contractions. That convention is also the reason there is anything to count. It is consistent enough across shows with nothing else in common, a fantasy epic, a Roman gladiator series, a Regency romance, a teen horror series and a biblical epic among them, that it turns up in the data as a measurable set.

How the list was made

Nobody chose these words. Here is what that actually means, because it is the only claim this page makes and it ought to be checkable.

Wordspotting counts what television says. Not which words are common, though, because the common ones are common everywhere and tell you nothing. The question is narrower: which words does one corner of television lean on that the rest of it barely touches? Words that answer that way together end up together, and nothing in the process reads a definition or knows what a genre is.

So nobody decided an old-fashioned list should exist and then went looking for members. The list came back on its own, and what came back with it is the finding: eleven shows sharing no genre, no century and no country, all reaching for the same vocabulary.

One thing to know as you read. A number of these are not old words at all, but ordinary ones used in an old-fashioned way, where what is unfamiliar is the sense rather than the word itself. Those are the entries worth slowing on, because they are the ones you would otherwise read straight past.

The words

How to actually remember them

Reading a list once is not learning it. You will recognise a few of these words tomorrow and almost none next month, because nothing has attached them to anything you were already paying attention to. What makes a word stick is meeting it somewhere you were going anyway. The useful version of this list is therefore not this page. It is the episode you are about to watch, with its unfamiliar words in front of you before you press play, so that when one of them arrives in the dialogue it is the second time you have seen it rather than the first.

That is what Wordspotting does. It finds the words you do not know in a show you are about to watch and teaches them to you first. The shows behind this list are in it, along with the rest of the catalogue.

The principle survives without any tool, if you would rather not use one. Pick one show, leave the subtitles on, and write down the words that come back more than once.