500 Foreign Words & Phrases You Should Know to Sound Smart: Terms to Demonstrate Your Savoir Faire, Chutzpah, and Bravado

Dazzle with your command of belle-lettres!

Like a true sophisticate, you'd like to toss out casual bon mots to enliven your conversation. You'd like to float through cocktail parties offering your guests crudités and hors d'oeuvres, toasting to the prevailing Weltgeist and speculating on who's having an affaire de coeur.

But first you need to know what those words mean.

Here's a guide to declaiming like an intellectual in a foreign language. More than 500 of the most commonly used foreign words and phrases that enhance our language and make us sound sophisticated have been translated into English, along with a pronunciation guide and a sample sentence showing you how to use them. In addition, you'll find quotations in other languages, which will impress everyone with your erudition and experiencia del mundo. All this together with a plethora of minutae, spicing the entries with an exquisite mélange of information that heightens their je ne sais quoi.

So get busy dotting your conversation with these words and phrases. Remember, Experientia docet.

Peter Archer is the author of The Quotable Intellectual and 500 Foreign Words and Phrases You Should Know to Sound Smart. He received an MA in history from the University of Toledo and an MLlitt in medieval history from the University of St. Andrews, where he wrote his thesis on the writings of St. Bede. He also taught courses on history, humanities, and philosophy at Eastern New Mexico University.