I learned preternatural from Anne Rice, pusillanimous and ratiocination from Preston & Child, anent from Baroness Orczy... what words did you actually learn from authors either because the word was cool or the author drilled it into your brain?

Lemony Snicket introduced me to “inordinate” as well as a few others, I’m sure

"Ineffable", from Good Omens.

Somnambulist from Calvin & Hobbes

Charlotte Bronte used many words that aren’t in common parlance. One that stuck with me is inanition — basically, emptiness caused by lack of nourishment.

Poe: “The tintinnabulation that so musically wells from the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells!”

Coruscate. Said about three dozen times in Sourcery by Terry Pratchett. 

Tisty-tosty by Hardy. Used to describe a plump and round lady. "Though they say she's a rosy cheeked, tisty-tosty little body enough".

The use of the word "ejaculate" (to exclaim) also makes for some hilarious reading to the modern ear. 

From War of the Worlds "The landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating."

I've learned so many words from reading books, I don't think I can even remember specifics.

The amount of times I absolutely butchered the pronunciation of them is staggering. Even still at 31 - I'll say a word and my fiance will have a giant grin on his face and ask me to repeat myself.

Decadent, in the more literal sense of the word. As in decay. Usually I think of it as excessive, like a big chocolate cake. But HP Lovecraft uses it to refer to decaying towns, etc

Obdurate

As in “the future is obdurate” from 11/22/63 by King

Maladroit, thanks to Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series.

I learned 'pusillanimous' from a song from a song by The Rutles

Blue chambray work shirt - Stephen King.

I encountered "vicissitude" while reading Vladimir Nabokov's Luzhin Defense and it got stuck in my head.

I learned pusillanimous from the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. I'm not sure it made it into the final cut. Jefferson was getting too heated and had to pull back.

antecedent and adamantine from Blood Meridian just last week, indelible from Dune and Laconic just an hour ago from House of Leaves

i keep a little notebook to write down new words and their meanings to help remember them

Just finished John Crowley's "Little, Big," which had so many amazing and previously unknown-to-me words that I began writing them down on the endpages: phthalic, machiolated, condign, malapert, eclandine, aestivating, epopts, operose! Reading that book was like journeying through a strange country of unfamiliar landmarks.

‘Chateau’, in second grade, from reading a fairy tale book about Cinderella and where her wicked stepfamily lived. Fairytales were my jam back then, eases me into my love for reading.

Anyway, a few weeks later I wrote in a homework assignment that one day when I grew up I wanted to live in a chateau and the teacher called my mother to report I cheated on the assignment because a second grader shouldn’t know a word like that.

Luckily, my mom remembered explaining to me what the word meant when I asked her weeks earlier, explained how and why I’d used the word, then blasted the teacher for rewarding my extracurricular reading with a cheating accusation. Yay, Mom!

Palimpsest - looked it up because of the book of the same name.

It only really clicked though when it was a plot point in Dimension20....

Melange from Frank Herbert, claudication from Diane Duane.

Rebarbative from Iris Murdoch. It took me ages to get the meaning fixed in my brain.

Obsequiousness from "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt!

Précis, from Oscar Wilde. I'm actually learning quite a few French words/ terms as well as some Greek & Roman mythology and history from him as I'm reading "Picture of Dorian Gray" right now. 

The Baroness also introduced me to the meaning of a word-- Pimpernel, lol.   The only other time I'd seen it before I read the first Pimpernel book was a character from The Babysitter's Club YA series complaining about how she didn't understand what the title even meant!

I forget who it was but eventually I saw "avuncular" enough that it stuck.

I learned lots of words with Thomas Covenant but forgot most of them. I think it might've helped with vocabulary for the SAT at the time.

Teyolloquanies. No idea what it means but I love the sound of it!

Obfuscate* from King. Firmament from McCarthy.

Tintinabulation, mien, sapid, and chiaroscuro. Stephen Donaldson.

"Physiognomy" from Dostoevsky.

"Atavistic" from Cormac McCarthy.

Recalcitrant from a Sookie Stackhouse novel, and I learned how to pronounce it watching The Nanny

Lugubrious. In one of the books in David Eddings Belgariad series it starts with calling the sound of a bell (on a donkey? I can’t remember it’s been ages) lugubrious and I remember looking it up several times because when I reread the book I’d forget what it was again. 

I also learned the word preternatural from Anne Rice! And it's a great word!

Callipygean, from Lolita. The first book I had to read with a dictionary next to me.

I just want to mention that sometimes I am reading a magazine and I will press on the word thinking the definition will pop up. Damn Kindle made me an idiot!

 I once stumped a boss of mine just by using "mollify"

I used to have a boss who would often pick up semi-obscure words I would say and then overuse them. It got to the point where I would say to colleagues ‘I bet I can make [boss] start saying [x word] next week.’ Then I would have a meeting with him and telling him about how the new process we’d introduced was anathema to the sales team.’ Before the week was out, everything was anathema 

Lots of 19th-century slang from Georgette Heyer, who also probably made up a lot of terms that sound 19th-century in order to maintain her brand and throw off copycats. I like and have used ‘doing it much too brown’ (i.e. stretching credibility, usually in the context of flattery), much to the confusion of friends.

Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides taught me many words, although the only one I still associate with that book is “purl” in the related-to-water sense.

I think it was Tim Powers that gave me Ashlar and Palimpsest. Reading the NY Times gave me fungible, frangible and risible - the pundits' big three. Those are the ones that stick with me as coming from somewhere specific.

One of my life's mysteries is which book taught me the word sequester. It was a novel and I read it sometime in the mid-late 90s (maybe?) but that's all I can remember except that it wasn't a classic.

After learning the word I would insist on telling my family I was off to sequester myself in my room whenever I wanted some peace and quiet. Bet that got old very quickly lol

Seems like “sluice” and “petrichor” were on the word-a-day toilet paper for many thriller authors. I can’t remember where I picked it up, but I love the word “defenestrate.”

I look up words from books I read all the time. I just don't usually remember them afterwards.

Anent is Scottish and used quite frequently in legal decisions and judgements in Scotland.

I learned the word zetetic from Iain (M) Banks' Excession.

There's a group called the Zetetic Elench who serve as a catalyst for the story and it occurred to me to wonder what zetetic meant rather than assuming it was a made-up SFnal word.

This was back in the mid-Nineties before the ubiquitous Internet so it required looking the word up in the Oxford English Dictionary when I was at a library.

It also turned out that elench is a proper word rather than an SFnal name.

Eleemosynary From Shirley, Charlotte Bronte

I learned mendacity from Tennessee Williams. I learned ejaculate can also mean "to shout out fervently" from one of the Brontës.

"Terroir" from the Area X novels by Jeff VanderMeer.

Can't really remember which specific words, but Harlan Ellison made me pick up a dictionary on quite a few occasions.

Stygian, from Edgar Rice Burroughs

Piers Anthony: mundane, a quality found in Mundania: tightly connected to Florida.

An entirely new vocabulary from Gene Wolfe, especially Book of the New Sun.

I learned sotto voce from The Locked Tomb. Mostly because it annoyed me so much every time I read\heard it while consuming the books but now it lives rent free in my head and every time someone is talking softly it echoes through my mind. I adore everything else about those books and can't stop thinking about them as it is, but man, sotto voce just makes me irrationally angry lol

Infinite Jest. I had to look up so many words that I had to use my phone, a thesaurus, and several bookmarks to read it. The only word I can remember right now is “wen” , which I believe is a kind of pimple or something like that (it’s been a few years since I read it) but yeah..his (David Foster Wallace) vocabulary was insane.

Phantasmagoric

from Anne Rivers Siddons

Who uses it enough that is is distracting

Larry Hama is a Vietnam War veteran who created and has been writing G.I. Joe since the early 80s. He's a smart guy who never wrote down to kids. I used to read those comics with a paper and pencil to write down all the words he used that I didn't know. Then, after I was  done reading, I'd go look up all the words in the dictionary and write down the definitions. His series The Nth Man actually had a glossary in the letters page of every issue! 

So, yeah, I occasionally confuse the autocorrect. My favorite word he taught me is "defenstrate" which means to throw someone out a window! 

I just started today to keep a note on my phone of words I look up while reading (I read PDFs and epub on my phone)

“Susurrus” - Ursula Le Guin

It’s like a whispering rustling sound. It’s from The Left Hand of Darkness and its usage is absolutely beautiful imo.

Obdurate, thanks to 11/22/63 by Stephen King

"Calculant" from William Faulkner

Catamites from Cormac Mccarthy. Brrrrrrr.

Rotomontade, egregious, flummery, sennight, discrete, and a bunch more from Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series. Picked up a lot from Agatha Christie, too.

'Concupiscent' - Filled with sexual desire; lustful

From East of Eden - speaking of Mr Edwards as something he isn't until he meets Cathy.

Joyce Carol Oates has used the word “inchoate” in her work. She’s the only writer I’ve ever read that uses that term.

While reading Lolita I probably spent more time researching words that actually following the plot. Only later did I find out that there's a version of the novel that has some sort of glossary

That's great that you read with a dictionary! It can be so rewarding to expand your vocabulary. I've picked up many words from authors over the years, but "ephemeral" from the poet John Keats always stuck with me. It's a beautiful word to describe the fleeting nature of life and beauty.

I can’t think of any right now that I learned. But a couple of months ago I read the book The Cloisters, it kept being recommended to me by my coworkers. Well that authors use of “arcane” was so much, bordering on excessive, that every time I hear that word I get whipped back to that book and I’m hating it. 

Funny enough, the word mown. I swore up and down that mown couldn't have been a word. When I spoke of mowing in the past participle I used words like shorn, thinking mowed sounded funny but was the only appropriate answer.

The look on my face when I was reading aloud with my wife and the Hobbits roll up on Tom Bombadil's house on a lawn of freshly "mown" turf. I had to read it. Stop. And eat every word I'd ever said about the rightness or wrongness of past participle of "mow" 😂

I remember saying to my friend's mom when I was 8, "What a blustery day!" and she just stared at me. (I learned it from reading Winnie the Pooh.)

I am sure I learned a lot of words from reading, but that's the only one that stands out in my memory.

Ennui from The Picture of Dorian Grey. It remains one of my favorite words. 

“Gingerly” from the kids cat books series. You know the ones

Milton taught me ‘obdurate’ 

I don’t know why it stuck with me. It’s just one of those words that sound like what it means 

Does anyone else feel like preternatural is in every other book these days?

Soughing from Dean Koontz

I think I learned sluice from Dean Koontz. Water is always sluicing in his novels (not to mention, his skies are always slate gray).

Guy i got a whole list going. U looking for something specific. My favorite recent learnings from books is cool phrases in foreign languages. Persona non grata: This is the opposite of persona grata, meaning someone who is unacceptable or unwelcome.

  Sine qua non: A phrase that means an essential condition or indispensable ingredient.

  Faux pas: Literally “false step,” used to describe a social blunder or mistake.

  Force majeure: A legal term that refers to an unforeseeable circumstance that prevents someone from fulfilling a contract.

Roborative. Used by Stephen Maturin throughout the Aubrey/Maturin series. Means giving strength, invigorating, pumping up.

Preternatural, but it was the Anita Blake series for me.

Almost all the words mentioned in this thread are ones I knew in my teens. I don't encounter new ones in fiction, unless maybe I learned what subincision was from Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro (it matters a lot in the story).

Peregranating from Lucy Maud Montgomery.

They were peregranating about the room. Or something like that. I have loved that description of someone flitting about, unable to settle down, every since.

I really should’ve finished reading the title cause I was stuck on preternatural trying to figure out if it was an error 🤦🏾

I learned "abscond" from Homestuck.

I learned penury from William Faulkner.

Flummoxed from Tolkien

Threnody, my favorite, from Stephen R Donaldson

Marmoreal is used multiple times in A Stranger in Olondria (fantastic fantasy novel). Means having a marble-like appearance

Defenestration from Patricia Briggs

I’m always learning words and rarely remember where I read them. I do remember I learned the word “prolix” from Catch-22. I’ve also, weirdly, learned a lot of words on the website of the music critic Robert Christgau. “Indelible” and “banal” come to mind.

Abeyance from U.K.Le Guin.

“Desultory” is one that I always had in the back of my mind with a vague sense of meaning but no real definition. Then Stephen Erikson decided to pull it out 34 times in Book of the Fallen and I shored up my understanding.

Recently finished "When Night Comes Falling" by Howard Blum; it is a terrible book written by a hack.

BUT it did introduce me to this word: "sedulous" (which means "diligent" roughly speaking)

Also the word "ineluctable" which means "irresistible" or "unavoidable".

Lest you think these were used in some highbrow context, here's the one for 'ineluctable':

It is as much a warning to the killer as it is an ineluctable vow to himself.

The guy also claims the basic structure of the book was based off the fucking Iliad, so...

Stephen Baxter loves the word discontinuity.

If it's a paper book, half the time I figure out roughly the meaning by either recognizing part of the word or using sentence context. Last couple of words I had to look up was fulgent (shining brightly) and recrudescense (recurrence of an undesirable condition). Kindle ebooks, I'm more likely to look up words since using the built in dictionary is really quick.

“Huzzah” from Baroness Orczy. I say it out loud a lot.

I read in my kindle. If you touch and hold the word a dictionary comes up. I do it in French English and Spanish

Recalcitrant from Upton Sinclair

“Singular” from Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes books always use it where I would say “Unique”.

I learned some words from jennifer eagan but they aren't coming to mind now!

Potsherds from Steven Erickson, in Malazan Book of the Fallen

Jocund from Stephen King

Stephen Donaldson loves using "argent" in his Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

I don’t think Faulkner ever wrote a single book that didn’t use the word recapitulation 

HP Lovecraft was a treasure trove of preternatural and gibbous words.

Well, I just learnt "anent" from you, so thank you for that! :)

I'm pretty sure caterwaul, penumbra, dulcet, supernumerary, uxorious, supposititious, tergiversate and much more were all words I first encountered, more or less, while reading the works of Thomas Hardy.

I learned the word ‘hitherto’ in 2nd year (8th grade) English because the author of “The Ghost of Thomas Kempe” used it like six times in one paragraph.

My first recollection of learning new words came from Calvin + Hobbes, actually. For a fictional 6-year old, Calvin had a great vocabulary.

Doc Smith wrote some of the most amazing space battles I’ve ever read—and that was back in the 1930s and 1940s!

“Coruscating beams of lambent energy bit and tore fiercely into the pirate ship’s outer screens, illuminating all of circumambient space in a polychromatic display of dazzling sparks and streamers!”

I made that up but it’s his style and he does it a billion times better than I ever could. Dude basically invented the space opera genre single handedly.

Dog-leg in the sense of the shape of a corridor or alley from Preston and Child. Wittles from Charles Dickens. Badinage from the political pundit George F. Will. Bistre, sable and anguissette from Jacqueline Carrey. Pastie (the food), saber, and polecat from Brian Jaques. Garners from a sonnet by John Keats. Carom and ansible from Orson Scott Card. Carbuncle from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Wraith and barrow-wight from J. R. R. Tolkien. Tailor from a book my mom used to read me called The Terrible Terrible Tiger. Legerdemain from the rapper Aesop Rock. Smite from the Bible. Coney from Shakespeare. Savant from Julie Andrews (she wrote an amazing children's book called The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles). Wardrobe and Turkish delight from C. S. Lewis. Quoin from Ken Follet.

exasperated from Beverly Cleary, and alacrity from Jane Austin.

I like to play a little game with myself to see if I can guess the word from the context and sentence. Then I look it up and see how right or wrong I was.

“Prosaic” showed up once in The Belgariad by David Eddings , which i reread several times when I was in middle/high school.

It later appeared on the SAT exam. My friend complained about it afterwards and I mentioned where I’d learned it. He was very mildly annoyed but given he’s now a successful rocket scientist, I’d say it didn’t affect him.

Oh, and regardless of whatever extra points it got me on the SAT: fuck David Eddings & his wife.

Defenestration from The Virgin Suicides

I remember reading Catch-22 in high school while I was prepping for the SATs. Joseph Heller has an incredible vocabulary, even though the book is largely remembered for its humor/absurdism/satire.