Why this word is great
OSTEOMANCY — [Noun] A form of divination performed by interpreting bones, whether scattered, cracked, or arranged in ritual patterns. From Ancient Greek osteo- ("bone") + -mancy ("divination"), likely coined by John Selden in 1612. Unlike "scapulimancy" (which confines itself to the prophetic cracks of shoulder blades) or "necromancy" (which traffics with restless spirits), osteomancy is the silent arithmetic of the dead, a calculus of chance and meaning inscribed in marrowless relics. It is the hollow clatter of knucklebones cast onto sun-baked earth, the delicate tracing of fissures in a fox’s femur, or the way a fortune-teller’s fingers linger over the vertebrae of a long-extinct bird—each fragment a cipher, each fracture a prophecy, as if the future were written not in stars but in the brittle grammar of skeletons.