As a freshly retired English teacher, I love archaic words. Arcane knowledge of a word like "pareidolia" is fun for trivia but utterly useless for communication given that the word is not widely used. As an ice breaker, I would sometimes display a word to students. The rule of the game was that they couldn't search it up on their phones or Chromebooks. The first decision was "Is the word real or fake?" So they may see a gibberish word like "percifunctant" or a real word like "zzyzx" and have to make a decision. If they guessed wrong, they were out of the game. Then those who were still in the game had to create a plausible definition and students would then share their definitions. It was 100% a thinking exercise. I once displayed "syzygy" and nearly all of the students said it was fake, but one student could actually define it. I was shocked and impressed.
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