These words could fall off Collins dictionary

A WORD'S LIFE: Currently hanging in balance is the fate of 24 words of the Collins variety.

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London: The life of words is not all that rosy. If their first task is to get into the dictionary, the next one is to stay on. That's a challenge, considering every new edition of a dictionary has to sacrifice some to accommodate scores of new ones.

Currently hanging in balance is the fate of 24 words of the Collins variety.

And The Times of London is making a last-ditch effort to extend their life into the forthcoming edition of The Collins dictionary.

The editors at Collins have decided they can dispense with the 24 rarely-used words listed below:

Abstergent: Cleansing or scouring

Agrestic: Rural; rustic; unpolished; uncouth

Apodeictic: Unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration

Caducity: Perishableness; senility

Caliginosity: Dimness; darkness

Compossible: Possible in coexistence with something else

Embrangle: To confuse or entangle

Exuviate: To shed (a skin or similar outer covering)

Fatidical: Prophetic

Fubsy: Short and stout; squat

Griseous: Streaked or mixed with grey; somewhat grey

Malison: A curse

Mansuetude: Gentleness or mildness

Muliebrity: The condition of being a woman

Niddering: Cowardly

Nitid: Bright: glistening

Olid: Foul-smelling

Oppugnant: Combative, antagonistic or contrary

Periapt: A charm or amulet

Recrement: Waste matter; refuse; dross

Roborant: Tending to fortify or increase strength

Skirr: A whirring or grating sound, as of the wings of birds in flight

Vaticinate: To foretell; prophesy

Vilipend: To treat or regard with contempt

Dictionary compilers at Collins have decided that the word list for the forthcoming edition of its largest volume is embrangled with words so obscure that they are linguistic recrement. Such words, they say, must be exuviated abstergently to make room for modern additions that will act as a roborant for the book.