English word that means the use of out of place uncommon words


I am looking for a word or short phrase that best describes a scenario in which an author seems to have copiously placed uncommon or higher educated vocabulary in a lower reading level book. Meaning that the book seems to be for a fourth grade reading level and then every few paragraphs an English Doctorate level word appears, possibly to impress readers.



Answer



[As requested, posting this as an answer instead of a comment]


There's lexiphanic, which is using pretentious wording or language, but it doesn't have the sense of intermittence you wanted.


(I found the word by plugging "using long words" into a reverse dictionary. The first two results, sesquipedalian and sesquipedality, are also good, but they don't necessarily have a negative connotation like lexiphanic.)


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

single word requests - What do you call hypothetical inhabitants living on the Moon?