Words David Foster Wallace Circled in His Dictionary That Were Used in Infinite Jest (And Where They Appear)

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TL;DR

A 2010 blog catalogue (the "DFW Words" blog, run by "Don") that takes the words David Foster Wallace circled in his American Heritage Dictionary — the same archive lexicon transcribed in bulk on Wordnik — and locates roughly fifty-five of them at specific passages in Infinite Jest, quoting each in context with a page cite. It advances no interpretive theory scoped to a novel crux; its value is as a reading resource, a bridge from Wallace's private word-collecting to the finished prose, and a demonstration that these were not idle circles: the rare words he marked in the dictionary turn up doing real work in the book. Every mapping below has been re-located in the novel's own paginated text.

Key claims

The blog pairs each circled word with (a) a short dictionary sense and (b) the Infinite Jest sentence(s) that use it, with page numbers.
The mapped words span the novel's registers: E.T.A. and tennis (aleatory, alfresco, ort, piaffer, portcullis), Ennet House and recovery (caparison, condonation, cunctation, scabrous), the drug and medical registers (glycine, sassafras, armamentarium, edema), the filmography and media apparatus (confluence, orthochromatic, descant, corporation), and the Incandenza family (kohl, lordosis, mucronate, onyx, delft).
Several words land in Infinite Jest's most-discussed passages: "aleatory" in the Schtitt tennis meditation that J.O. Incandenza "would articulate" as a Cantorian "continuum of infinities" (scene 026); "fictile" in the E.T.A. lesson on learning to wear "masks of ennui and jaded irony" (scene 135); "parturient" in the Death-Mother / Madame Psychosis reading of the Entertainment (scene 159); "caparison" in the White Flag raffle scene (scene 074).
The blog also records an editorial tally: "There are 295 instances of the word 'tennis' in Infinite Jest." — offered alongside the entry for "tennis," which Wallace circled.
A cluster of the circled words appear only in the endnotes (apathetic, armamentarium, catachresis, internecine, orthochromatic, preterition, rectus, salient, shako, suborn) — consistent with the endnotes being where the novel's most technical diction concentrates.

Where the circled words appear in the novel

Each word below was re-located in the novel's paginated text; the scene number is the archive's, the page is the blog's cite, confirmed to fall in that scene's range. Words whose passage lives in the endnotes are given by page and note number (no scene link), since the endnote apparatus is not a numbered scene.

Main-text passages:

adit — the south exit-tunnel's adit as Orin passes under the goalposts at the moment of the punt-team injury that opens his career (scene 068, p. 291)
ailanthus — Joelle climbing down from the 5-Woman's window (scene 120, p. 614)
aleatory — Schtitt's tennis-as-expansion intuition, articulated by J.O.I. as a "continuum of infinities" (scene 026, p. 82)
alfresco — E.T.A. dawn drills before the Lung inflates (scene 094, pp. 452-453; also p. 389)
apercu — Blott and Beak (scene 036, p. 121)
aphotic — the E.T.A. optics survey off the Comm.-Ad. tunnel (scene 053, p. 188)
astrolabe — the unnamed depression seeming "to hang fog-like" over the NA meeting room's "decorative astrolabes" (scene 100, p. 504)
autolysis — post-satiation at E.T.A. (scene 122, p. 631)
caparison — Glenn K.'s "scarlet velour caparison," White Flag (scene 074, pp. 366-367); "fellowship caparison" of the veil (p. 533)
condonation — Hal's "30-day urological condonation" (scene 160, p. 796)
confluence — Geoffrey Day's horror summoned by "the odd confluence of the fan and those notes" (scene 124, p. 649); "Cinema of Chaotic Stasis" (endnote, p. 996, note 61)
corporation — the "Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corporation" transcript (scene 168, p. 883)
cunctation — "blank cunctations and disassociated leaps" (scene 076, p. 368)
delft — Mario knocking figurines off the etagere (scene 179, p. 951)
descant — the cartridge's "female-choral" theme music (scene 138, p. 702)
digitate — the "digitate spikes" of the sun over the Tortolitas (scene 033, p. 97)
dihedral — the mattress "hypotenuse" as J.O.I. helps his father move the bed (scene 099, pp. 495, 501)
edema — blind Dymphna's delayed enrollment, "Dural edema or something" (scene 114, p. 567; also p. 921)
élan — Gately's "ferocious and jolly élan" as an addict (scene 016, p. 55)
entrepôt — Pemulis's "time-tested entrepôt" above the drop ceiling (scene 057, p. 216; also p. 1067, endnotes)
espadrille — the men's-room espadrilles, Hal's opening (scene 003, p. 15; also pp. 1041-1042, endnotes)
fictile — the E.T.A. "masks of ennui and jaded irony" lesson (scene 135, p. 694)
forensic — the Blammo/Shriners decapitations (scene 116, p. 581)
fulgurant — "different Lyles at different fulgurant moments" (scene 082, p. 387)
glycine — the "glycine bags" of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine in Joelle's purse at Molly Notkin's party (scene 062, pp. 229, 236)
imbricate — the "imbricate reptile skin" boots at White Flag (scene 074, p. 344)
kohl — Avril's "kohl around her eyes," the four-way meeting (scene 068, pp. 285-286)
legatee — the Prince's legatees' InterLace accounts (scene 007, p. 35)
lordosis — Mario's "lordosis in his lower spine" (scene 071, p. 313)
meatus — "cranial meatus" (scene 018, p. 60); "acoustic meatus" (p. 182)
mucronate — Mario's "mucronate and talonesque" fingers (scene 071, p. 314); a "mucronate dagger" tattoo (p. 208)
nacelle — the Lung's "nipply nacelle" (scene 065, p. 269)
onyx — the "onyx coffee table" Mario falls against (scene 179, p. 953)
ort — the E.T.A.s playing with "orts on their plates" (scene 091, p. 438)
parturient — the "Death-Mother figure" / Madame Psychosis (scene 159, pp. 788-789)
penumbra — the Berkshires' "penumbra" from Route 27 (scene 160, p. 797)
perfidy — "grandiose perfidy," Tiny Ewell's dream recounted at Gately's bedside (scene 161, p. 814)
piaffer — the Csikszentmihalyi kid "doing a kind of piaffer" (scene 183, p. 965)
poplar — the "poor-postured Lombardy poplars" (scene 160, p. 797)
portcullis — Clipperton and the E.T.A. "portcullis" spikes (scene 089, p. 432)
recruit — "You sought to recruit him!" in the deans'-office scene of Hal's opening (scene 003, p. 14); the drill sergeant (p. 515)
réseau — the "thread-fine reseau of lines" gridding the sky, weeks after a hallucinogen its taker calls "The Madame" (scene 105, p. 542)
sarcastic — "sarcastic whistles at Freer's unitard" (scene 172, p. 909)
sassafras — "nutmeg and sassafras oil" psychedelics (scene 171, p. 904)
scabrous — a "scabrous fire escape" (scene 054, p. 197); the "scabrous hot sandpaper" court surface in the father's tennis monologue (p. 168)
skirl — "skirl of wind on the sharp edges of dumpsters" (scene 109, p. 556)
solander — the "rolling solander box" of beanies, Eschaton (scene 073, p. 342)
syntax — Marathe on Steeply's "horrid pronunciation and the syntax" (scene 103, p. 529)
tennis — "no more reducible to delimited factors," Schtitt and J.O.I.'s shared view of the game (scene 026, p. 81)
thymus — the woman who could cut out "Joelle's pancreas and thymus" (scene 150, p. 747)

Endnote passages (page and note number):

apathetic — the "Marijuana Thinking" footnote (p. 1047, note a on p. 1048 in the blog's cite)
armamentarium — Pemulis's concealed kit (p. 1066; blog cites p. 1067)
catachresis — the Clonidine note (p. 1053, note 285)
internecine — the toothbrush-tampering note (p. 1077, note 352)
orthochromatic — the "Neorealism" gloss (p. 1027)
preterition — "Survivalism, Preterition, Anti-Abortionism" (archive locates this at p. 1055; blog cites p. 1058, fn. 5)
rectus — the "Rectus Bulbi" security note (p. 1032, note 180)
salient — the "Methuen salient" note (p. 1078, note 371)
shako — Idris Arslanian's "bearskin shako" note (p. 1029, note 148)
suborn — Pemulis making a customer "explicitly suborn him" (p. 1035, note 211)

Themes

Language and vocabulary as craft; the "snoot"/lexical-precision sensibility; the material link between Wallace's private word-collecting and the finished texture of Infinite Jest.

Cross-references

wordnik-dfw-circled-dictionary-words — the full 494-word list of dictionary circles; this blog maps a subset of it into the novel.
The circled-words habit connects to Hal the "lexical prodigy" and to the SNOOT-genetics characterization of Avril the "militant grammarian" — the novel dramatizing the very vocabulary-collecting the archive documents.
The most theory-adjacent passages the blog happens to surface belong to cruxes tracked elsewhere: the "aleatory" tennis-infinity passage and J.O.I.'s aesthetics; the "fictile" masks-of-irony lesson and the anti-irony / new-sincerity theme; the "parturient" Death-Mother and the Entertainment's contents. The blog only quotes them; it makes no claim about them.

Notable passages

The blog's own editorial tally: "There are 295 instances of the word 'tennis' in Infinite Jest."
On "fictile," quoting the novel: the young are taught "masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age" where the face is "fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears."
On "aleatory," quoting the novel: the "aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth" of tennis's branching possibilities.
On "caparison," quoting the novel: Glenn K. in his "scarlet velour caparison and makeup and candelabrum."