whale
n.— «In horseplaying parlance, Maury Wolff is a whale, one of the thousand or so professional bettors who collectively wager as much as $1.5 billion a year on thoroughbred races in the United States. He will not attend the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on Saturday. In fact, he and the other whales rarely set foot in a racetrack.» —“Horse Racing’s Biggest Bettors Are Reaping Richest Rewards” by Joe Drape New York Times Apr. 26, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
If you’re ever near a sundial, step closer and look for a message. Many sundials bear haunting, poetic inscriptions about the brevity of life. Plus, language development in toddlers: why and how little ones pick up the exclamation Uh-oh! And a new...
If you mistype something, that’s a typo. But what do you call it when your voice-to-text program mistypes as you’re dictating? Is that a mico, as in microphone? Plus, the word sycophant has a long and surprising history that goes all the way back to...