Pronounced: DY-uhl (alt: deel), noun/adj
Notes: I’m surprised that I haven’t heard this word
Yesterday’s word
The word gadzookery is a British word, and means “the use of archaisms (as in a historical novel)”
First usage
Our word came into English in the 1950s
Background / Comments
I might be able to be accused of gadzookery; I’m not an author, but I do like some of the older words not much in use… whence is, I think, archaic, but useful. Another archaic word is the exclamation “pshaw!”. Dropping “thou”, “thy”, or “thine” into speech is another gadzookery. “Gadzooks” is an expression used by a character in the Charles Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickleby. It wasn’t a gadzookery then, but using it now would definitely be — and thus our word came from “gadzooks” combined with “-ery” to make it a noun.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 