I've always been fascinated by words, their origins, meanings and usages, and some words - for no particular reasons - I find oddly curious. I'm sure you'll have your own personal oddities, but one that I find persistently odd is "tracklement".

The OED defines a tracklement as a jelly eaten with meat [British, rare], and I always thought it has a Victorian or Georgian feel to it. Imagine my surprise to find the word was coined around 1950 by a food writer called Dorothy Hartley, though it may have been based on a much earlier word like "tranchiment" that was in use in Northern and Central England.

There's actually an English firm called Tracklements that sells things like sticky fig relish, old-fashioned picallili, hot garlic and other "charcuteriments".

Got an odd word for the thread?