I'm not normally a nerd. Well, okay, I am frequently a little nerdy, but I generally read books without feeling compelled to make vocabulary lists. Really, I do. Except for books that my book club reads. For those I break out the dictionary. Now in a book about the making of the OED, you'd think the list would be longer than, say, the list for a Nero Wolfe mystery (Some Buried Caesar). But no. They are about the same length. Anyway, here are some of the fascinating words found in The Professor and the Madman:

lexicography - process of writing, editing, or compiling a dictionary
louche - of questionable taste or morality
wen - harmless cyst, especially on scalp or face (ewwwww...)
lubricious - shifty or tricky
reify - to regard or treat an abstraction as if it had concrete or material existence (I knew that!)
postlapsarian - after The Fall (as in the fall of Adan and Eve)
tocsin - a warning; an omen; an alarm sounded on a bell
pudicity - modesty, chastity
fascicle - small bundle; one of the parts of a book published in separate sections
rebarbative - tending to irritate
argot - specialized vocabulary or set of idioms used by a particular group, jargon

Priapism you can look up for yourself. Suffice to say that you learn surprising things when reading about the making of the OED.