Are there words native speakers don't use? [closed]

I’ll give you three words that are still very much used in Philippine English which, I was told, are no longer (or, at best, rarely) used in the UK or America:

  1. Thrice
  2. Viand
  3. Solon

I definitely think there are some words not generally used by native speakers that one can find in the dictionary. But they will get taken out of the dictionary if no one is using them. Of course that depends on the type of dictionary, The OED never loses words but some of their other products do.

On a more interesting note, Collins (the company) removed the word supererogate which is a word I would understand as a philosopher but I only use supererogatory.see here.

I would think unused English words that appear in the OED would fall under three categories:

(1) words no longer in common usage anywhere [removed from most other dictionaries] (2) words used by specialists (3) words used by people only in some region of the word (including possibly ones where English is not the primary language).


There are many of those words. In Germany a mobile phone for example is called Handy, or if you watch a soccergame in public with many other people, it's called public viewing.

Those words do exist in the native vocabulary, but have a way different meaning.