Words: retrorse, adj.

IN HIS book The Surgeon of Crowthorne, Simon Winchester supplies medical background to the character Dr Minor's act of autopeotomy, and offers a warning: beware "the renowned bloodsucking Brazilian fishlet known as candiru, which likes to swim up a man's urine stream and lodge in the urethra, with a ring of retrorse spines preventing its removal, one of the very rare circumstances in which doctors will perform the operation known as a peotomy."

Winchester's use of retrorse - from the Latin, to mean turned backwards - was last done in 1882, according to the OED. Not only has this biography sold more than all of his other books put together, but it looks certain to bring Winchester OED immortality.