Wall Street analysts who cover Bank of America need a grasp of complex financial metrics, familiarity with regulatory ratios and, apparently, a high SAT vocabulary score.

When the second-largest U.S. bank discloses its quarterly financial results, analysts have to decipher the lexicon of CEO Brian Moynihan, riddled with obscure, archaic words fit for novelists or judges of bygone centuries.

It's no happenstance that Moynihan regularly jams words such as "gainsay, " "concomitant" and "fantods" into otherwise ordinary sentences when he addresses the street. It's part of a secret game the 66-year-old plays on calls with analysts, according to people familiar with the matter. So secret, in fact, that just a small circle inside Bank of America is in on the joke.

Moynihan challenges himself to find a way to use certain vocabulary words on the calls, the people said. The more arcane, the better. The words are randomly chosen at the last minute for Moynihan to insert within the prepared scripts, one of the people said.

Moynihan has more than once used "gainsay," or to declare something as untrue or invalid. One quarter he said the bank saw strong adviser productivity and "concomitant" growth in fee-based assets. Another quarter he said he didn't "get fantods," or rather that he wasn't nervous.

"There is no question, Brian loves a good challenge and always makes us think," a Bank of America spokeswoman said. "Or what might be called ludically noetic."

Moynihan tends to slide in one vocabulary word for each earnings call. But sometimes there are multiple suspect words in a single sentence.

Executives and staff at the bank take it upon themselves to try to find the words Moynihan swapped in, the people said. At times it's obvious.

"A perspicacious analyst might wonder whether talk of inflation, recession and other factors would fructify in a slower spending growth," Moynihan said in an analyst call in 2022.

A lawyer by trade who studied history at Brown University, where he is now the chancellor, Moynihan is known to be intelligent, with what some close to him describe as a photographic memory. He is cautious, disciplined and is said to work constantly.

Sometimes referred to around the industry as an "accidental CEO," Moynihan took the helm of Bank of America in 2010. The board brought him in for the job after a failed external search to replace Ken Lewis, who resigned under fire.

Moynihan has since cemented his hold on the bank, with a turnaround that stabilized and de-risked the bank after the 2008-09 financial crisis. He's sticking to his mantra of "responsible growth," unwilling to re-create the highflying days of Bank of America's past that led to government bailouts. The stock has recently hit all-time highs, though it has underperformed some rivals in recent years and succession has become a topic among investors.

Moynihan isn't generally considered an eloquent speaker or known for a flashy personality on par with other big bank executives, particularly JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. He mutters and trails off when he speaks publicly, making him hard to quote in full. These are the kind of lapses that big companies go to great lengths to drill out of executives, through private coaches or exercises.

When asked on a podcast this year what he does to relax, Moynihan said: "I spend time with my family, I exercise, I do things, I read," recalling he'd recently read a book about cod.

The vocabulary game shows a sense of humor that doesn't always come through in public, some of the people said.

An AI review of earnings transcripts since 2010 by the Wall Street research firm AlphaSense found that Moynihan uses a "distinct mix" of "highly obscure vocabulary" and "sophisticated" corporate terminology.

It can sometimes lead to miscommunications. On an analyst call this July, Moynihan told analysts the Iran war was "anfractuous," or full of windings and intricate turnings or tortuous, according to Merriam-Webster.

A transcript from FactSet picked that word up as "infructuous," which means fruitless or unprofitable. The Bloomberg Terminal recorded it as "intractable," or hard to control. S&P Global Market Intelligence logged the sentence as "the Iran war is in [fractures]."

Wells Fargo bank analyst Mike Mayo called the vocabulary Moynihan uses on calls an "intellectual flex" and said it was better to keep it simple.

"It is kind of like the anti-Jamie Dimon," Mayo said. When Dimon speaks, "everybody understands."