Weekly English Words with Alisha - Fantasy Words

Welcome back to Weekly Words. My name is Alisha, and today we're going to talk about fantasy

words. Ooh, let's get started. Sounds interesting.

“Dwarf” is the first word. A dwarf, in fantasy stories, refers to someone

who is very short, often rather beardy. In ‘The Lord of the Rings’ for example, there

are many dwarf characters. So in a sentence, “Dwarves are well known for their mining

skills”.

Okay. The next word is “unicorn”. A unicorn is a mystical horse, usually white

and it has a giant horn coming out of its head. I was really into unicorns when I was

little. If there's a book in the store that had a unicorn on it I was like “I'm getting

that book”. A unicorn, uni meaning one, corn, not really corn. I imagine historically

maybe corn was horn. In a sentence, “I loved unicorns when I was a little girl”.

“Dragon” is the next word. A dragon is a giant, giant reptile-like creature

that can fly and breathe fire. How awesome is that? Dragons are notoriously difficult

for heroes to defeat.

“Vampire”. I feel like vampires have long histories in

a few different cultures. They are human-like and, depending on the story, they can change

into a bat. They cannot go out during the day, they only come out at night, and they

drink the blood of humans to stay alive, that's the only thing that they can consume. They

live for hundreds of years. The sunlight will kill them. What is that called? The Twilights—

Twilight, that's right, I haven't seen Twilight, I haven't read the Twilight books. It seems

he can go out in the sun, doesn't he glitter? I heard that he glittered. Vampire is a really

cool Halloween costume.

The next word is “elf”. Elf. Elves are the coolest, clearly. They

have, at least in the context of this sort of fantasy thing, they have pointy ears, they're

really tall, they're so beautiful, they live forever, they're really, really good at everything

they do. Elves, come on, like. They have kind of magical powers it seems, too. They can

make bread that will keep you full for a long time. They can make swords that have special

powers when you use them. I once thought elves were so cool that I tried to learn the language

that was made by J. R. R. Tolkien. He actually made an Elves language, and for a brief period

in high school I tried to learn it myself too, I would write it everywhere. I thought

it was really beautiful. But then I moved on to an actual language.

Alright. Okay the next word is the end. The end is a mystical creature that— now you

know. Thanks very much for joining us this week and we'll see you again next time for

something else. Bye. Next is Hobbit. Hobbit—