The English language is constantly growing and changing, in part because society continues to grow and change, and new words are needed to describe new inventions and discoveries. Sometimes what has been discovered is a new way to have fun, like scuba diving (popularized in the early 1950s) or snowboarding (which started in the early 1970s) or geocaching (first played in the year 2000). Our hobby is vocabulary improvement, and we’ve found some interesting words for you today giving the names for people with a variety of hobbies.

philatelist (fih-LAY-tuh-list)
In 1864 the French stamp collector Georges Herpin decided that the French word for stamp-collecting, timbremanie (“an obsession with stamps”) wasn’t quite right to describe his hobby, so he invented the word philately, using the Greek root words philo- (“love”) and ateleia (“without tax”). This second root word only makes sense if you know that letters used to be mailed either with postage or without, and if the sender had put postage stamps on the letter, the recipient would receive it without having to pay a postage tax upon delivery. A philatelist is a stamp collector, or someone who studies stamps.

bibliophile (BIB-lee-oh-file)
Another word formed using the Greek root word meaning love, a bibliophile is someone who loves and collects books. The Greek word biblos means a bible, or more generically, a book. This word also was originally used in France and became part of the English language in the early 1800s.

lepidopterist (LEP-ih-DOP-tur-ist)
If you look closely at a butterfly’s wings, you’ll see that they’re covered with tiny, glittering scales. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus gave the name Lepidoptera to the order of insects that include butterflies and moths in 1735, using the Greek words lepidos (“fish scale”) and pteron (“wing”). A lepidopterist is someone who collects butterflies.

spelunker (speh-LUNK-er)
The Latin word spelunca (“grotto, cavern”) gives us this word for someone who explores caves. Spelunking, caving, and potholing all describe the hobby of going down into holes in the ground, though these days professional cavers use the 1950s term spelunker to refer to an amateur or untrained explorer.

deltiologist (DEL-tee-AHL-oh-jist)
“Having a wonderful time – wish you were here!” is a phrase often found on the items collected by a deltiologist: postcards. Like many other words that were coined by and for hobbyists, it’s made out of two Greek root words, in this case deltos (“writing tablet”) and logia (“study”). Many deltiologists focus on a specific type of postcard, either by style or by topic. We know someone who specializes in collecting what he calls “boring postcards” of unremarkable buildings, landmark-free scenery, or extremely uninteresting tourist destinations such as parking lots or the birthplaces of people who are no longer famous.

We hope you’ve enjoyed these words we collected for you today!