Difficult Words #5: Illth
By Christian Ford, Hogsalt
The first thing to know is that illth is a real word which you can find in Volume VII of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was coined in 1860 by John Ruskin, the English writer, artist, philanthropist and all-around too-smart-guy-with-spot-on-taste. Ruskin, from his vantage point in the cockpit of the industrial revolution, realized that reality had outpaced the language. In an era of spectacular explosions of riches and astounding leaps in material culture — that is, the stuff that we have access to — there was something else happening, too. That something was the opposite of wealth, which he termed illth.