Fancy Vocabulary #6

Why wait if it's a correct answer?

I'm not arguing one way or the other, but I tried Somnambulator as well. I knew the verb "(to) somnambulate", but didn't know the noun form and took a guess...

I'd say "The noun" is somnambulist. You could argue whether or not to use words that are not in use anymore. (it can give quite a bit of difficulties in a spelling quiz, since nearly (Alternative forms; nerely, nerly, neerely, nearely (all obsolete)) every word used to be spelled differently.)

But I just did some research (since I had never heard of somnambulator) and found this; "OED's only evidence for somnambulator is from 1822, in the writing of Prichard." And also according to ngram it is basically non-existent. Which made me question if it ever was really a word.

But after some more digging I found one earlier use (The life or Charles Brockden Brown, 1814) Also a few more later ones, though they all were just quoting Prichard (a treatise on the diseases of the nervous system).

At some point, the word did start to show up in medical dictionary (first still mentioning Prichard "Worchester, 1860" but after about 1900 there are some without source )

In short, at one point it actually was a word since it showed up in dictionaries of the time (pointing you to somnambulist, or mentioning "rare" like in Allen's synonyms and antonyms, 1921), However I have only found 2 original sources for the word, the rest is just referring back to the original use. So even at a time when it was not archaic the use seems to have been limited.

Here is the ngram btw

It was an interesting rabbit hole :) most of the morning gone already haha. Better point my attention elsewhere now :)