Bear in mind that my first encounter with D&D was at age 6 or 7. I was already a reader, and D&D strongly encouraged me to read more, by providing interesting and/or challenging words to add to my vocabulary.
It’s not that I didn’t see these words anywhere else, or that I wouldn’t have learned them elsewhere, or even that D&D was my first exposure to these words. It’s that these words are found in D&D books and therefore playing D&D does illuminate these ideas. More pointedly, in my own experience, I saw these words multiple times and that meant I actually learned them, as opposed to skimming over each one in a book once and never seeing it again.
It’s great to figure out the meaning of a word from context in a story, but it’s even better to look it up and see all the possible meanings and usages. Your experience may vary, but I learned these words several years before they were taught in school… if they were taught at all.
This list is nowhere near complete… it’s just starting.
A
abjuration, adaptation, adventurer, alacrity, alchemist/alchemy, ampersand, amphibian, amphigory, antipathy, aphrodisiac, arbalest, artifact, artillery, artisan, assassin, astral, avatar, avian
B
bane, banshee, barbarian, beneficent, besiege, bestow, bookworm, bruin, buoyancy, burnished
C
cabal, caltrop, carrion, castellan, causality, cavalier, celerity, celestial, character, comeliness, compendium, conclave, conjuration, contingency, convocation, corbel, corridor, courtier, crossbow
D
decanter, defiler, deity, demi-, dexterity/dextrous, dimension/dimensional, dissension, divination, domination, dragon, druid, dungeon, dweomer, dwindling
E
ebon, efficacious, effulgent, elemental, embattled, enclave, encompassing, epuration, erstwhile, evoke/evocation, exacted/exacting, expeditious
F
falchion, feat, fencer/fencing, fetter, fledgeling, fortification, frugality, fugue, furtive
G
gage, gauntlet, geography, geyser, gibbet, glaive, glyph, gnome, graven, grounding, guardian, guisarme
H
halberd, hallucinatory, harrowing, hearth, hetaera, hierophant
I
idol, illusion/illusory, implosion, impudent, interdiction, invisibility, invoke/invocation
J
javelin
K
keening, kukri
L
licentious, lycanthrope/lycanthropy
M
malison, meld, mellifluous, meta-, metamorphose/metamorphosis, morale, mystic, mythology
N
necromancy, nimbus, numinous
O
oath, opportunist, orison
P
paladin, penultimate, pernicious, perpetual, phantasm, phantasmagoria, phantom, pinnacle, polyglot, polymorph, portmanteau, primal, probability, proficiency, propitious, pugilist, pugnacious, puissance, putrefy/putrefaction
Q
quest
R
radiant, rally, ranger, ranseur, rapier, rapport, relic, rend, resound, reverent, riven, role, rube, rune
S
sanctuary, sanctum, scarab, scrimshaw, sculpture, sentinel, sequester, siege, sigil, simulacrum, solipsism, spawn, spell, sprite, summon
T
talisman, telekinesis, telepathy, terrain, thaumaturgy, threnody, tine, transmogrification, transmute
U
usurp, utterance
V
vermin, vigilance, viscid, voulge
W
ward, wrack
There was more to it, of course, than just building vocabulary. I read about mythology; by the time it was mentioned in school I knew as much about it as the teacher did. So it wasn’t just vocabulary I acquired… it was knowledge.
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