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Articles 1771 - 1800 of 4911
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Spelling It Out, Leonard R. N. Ashley
Spelling It Out, Leonard R. N. Ashley
Word Ways
Here is some amusing wordplay. Forget "A as in Apple" and "X as in Xylophone" when people perhaps annoyingly, ask you to spell out a name. Maybe you could get by with alpha, Bravo,, and so on, but why not entertain (or exasperate) with one of the two following systems?
Onomastic Puns, Robert M. Rennick
Onomastic Puns, Robert M. Rennick
Word Ways
By far the most popular form of word play is the pun. Linguists who prefer big words call his paronomasia. What it boils down to is a word, phrase, or idiomatic expression with more than one meaning, or two words with the same sound but different meanings. The humor comes when you expect a word to mean something but it turns out unexpectedly to mean something else.
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.
Kickshaws, Dave Morice
Run For The Biggest Word
Word Ways
Much has been written in Word Ways about the longest word. I've asked the question differently and come up with an answer that is far removed from those giant but unmemorable chemical and medical terms logologists are so fond of. The latter might make up a few lines in the dictionary, but the biggest word in my dictionary. Macquarie Australian Dictionary, Revised 3rd Edition 2001 (M), takes up more than a page. And the answer is ...RUN! Two other words exceed one page, GO and TAKE. The value of this exercise is to note which words are the richest - …
Renaming The Schwar(T)Zkopf Baby, Eric Chaikin
Renaming The Schwar(T)Zkopf Baby, Eric Chaikin
Word Ways
DEBORAH GLUPCZYNSKI does not need to repeat herself. There she is in all her glory - a doctor from western Massachusetts - 18 letters, no repeats, and a new record for a real person's name. She surpasses the previous record holder, dearly departed 17-letter MELVIN SCHWARZKOPF, formerly of Illinois. This discovery begs some important questions in the exciting field of heterogrammic onomastics - the study of names which do not repeat a letter. (The term heterogram - a word with no repeated letters - refers to a word in which all letters appear the same number of times.) These questions …
Fictitious Names, Robert M. Rennick
Fictitious Names, Robert M. Rennick
Word Ways
In the early 1950s, when i was an undergraduate at a certain midwestern university, one of the favorite pasttimes of my fellow students and me was the making of names. But we weren't content to stop there; we had to convince each other, and the authorities, that these names identified real persons. As blatant as this sounds, we would go to considerable lengths to enroll our creations in classes, student clubs and athletic teams, and we even offered them as prom queen (and king) candidates and nominated them for honor societies, including Phi Beta Kappa. We submitted lists of these …
Sounding Of The Pun: The Official Spoonerism Game, Don Hauptman
Sounding Of The Pun: The Official Spoonerism Game, Don Hauptman
Word Ways
In my semi-definitive but now tragically out-of-print spoonerism book Cruel and Unusual Puns, I spoke somewhat disparagingly of a familiar type of the children's riddle. Example: What's the difference between a church bell and a burglar? One peals from the steeple: the other steals from the people.
Some Sentential Palindromic Five-Squares, Jim Puder
Some Sentential Palindromic Five-Squares, Jim Puder
Word Ways
The oldest word square on record, the famed SATOR-AREPO-TENET-OPERA-ROTAS square known form at least three widely separated Roman Empire sites, is also a palindromic square; that is, its five words, when read in order in any direction, form a letter-unit palindrome.
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 37 Issue 1
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 37 Issue 1
Word Ways
Front cover and publication information for this issue.
Compass Roses, Rex Gooch
Compass Roses, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
Compass roses were invented by Christopher McManus in W2003-231. I found them pleasing to look at and challenging to do. He had a little difficulty with some of the words in the 9-compass: there are myriads of these in a large dictionary, through finding common 3-letter words to fit is a little difficult. The first 9-roses uses purely OED solid headwords, but has a repeat. The second consists of OED solid headwords, though Wiskinkie and Sasak for proper nouns.
A Magical Pair Of 6x6 Chemical Squares, Mike Keith
A Magical Pair Of 6x6 Chemical Squares, Mike Keith
Word Ways
The two 6x6 squares below contain 72 distinct entries from the periodic table of the elements, chosen from among the 110 which have been assigned official names by the IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry). Each small square displays the standard abbreviation and atomic number of its element.
The Fine Art Of Misspelling, Dave Morice
The Fine Art Of Misspelling, Dave Morice
Word Ways
I have never misspelled a word in my life. I've tried to do it many times, but who can consciously misspell a word? Once I tried misspelling DOG. I typed DAHG, careful not to hit the O key instead of the A and the H. But since I intended to spell it that way, I didn't spell it. I merely succeeded in spelling an unconventional variant of it. If I had accidentally typed DOG, then i would've spelled DAHG. So I tried to purposely misspell DAHG instead of DOG, and it worked! I typed DOG. But no, it didn't work. …
Transdeleted And Transadded Presidents, Darryl Francis
Transdeleted And Transadded Presidents, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
Take the surnames of the US presidents. For each one, what is the longest transdeletion and what is the shortest transaddition? Jim Puder posed and answered these problems in the August 1998 Word Ways. The November 1998 Colloquy contained a healthy response to Puder's article, improving on several of the words offered.
The World Of Agamemnons, Susan Thorpe
The World Of Agamemnons, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
Agamemnon words are so-called because, like AGAMEMNON, they are made of three different 3-letter palindromic groups. To date, 10 such words have appeared in Word Ways: AJANENSIS, MIMULUSES, COCACEAE, ILICACEAE, SUSUHUNAN, MIMICISMS, NANNONAIA, ANALALAVA, MOMBEBACA and AGAMEMNON itself. Their details can be found on page 218 of the August 2001 issue of Word Ways. Here I offer a further 60 agamemnon words.
Coincidental Self-Synonymy
Word Ways
The February 2003 Kickshaws (03-54) defined self-synonymy as two synonyms - if any exist that are spelled the same but are unrelated etymologically. David Silverman in an earlier Kickshaws (74-108) stated that if two words are homographic (and homophonic) synonyms they must be the same word. This seemingly obvious dictum would be refuted by a self-synonym pair. They're the same but not same. David Morice compared this idea to a linguistic Mobius strip. Schizograms is another apt name for such split personalities, but that coinage I reserve for coincidental contronyms (part III), where it applies doubly.
Vowel Sequences, Rex Gooch
Vowel Sequences, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
This article examines "runs" of the vowels a, e, i, o, u, in words and phrases. An example is proeuious (modern previous), which is counted as a run in six vowels. To save space, the level of detail given diminishes as the number of examples increases. Where the words themselves are not given, the results are unverified, and it may be assumed that a few instances will be of poor transliterations, or be otherwise unacceptable. This will greatly affect the conclusions.
Name Droppings
Word Ways
In the November 1994 Kickshaws Peter Newby introduced a style of punning on well-known names of the form "Was Franchot Ton deaf? Was Vincent Price conscious?", calling them logomotives. Here's my three cents worth (would Lotte Lenya threepenny)?
Aeiou In Order - Again!, Darryl Francis
Aeiou In Order - Again!, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
Popular word puzzle lore has it that there are only two relatively common words having the five vowels AEIOU appearing once each and in order: ABSTEMIOUS and FACETIOUS. Over a dozen other such words and terms were logged in Language on Vacation and pre-1998 issue of Word Ways. The number of such AEIOU words jumped dramatically in February 1998, though, with the publication of SUsan Thorpe's article, "AEIOU in Order". Susan's article brought together the previously published AEIOU words, many new finds in Webster's Second Edition and the Oxford English Dictionary, plus many culled from the pages of biological references. …
Unspeakably Absurd (A Is For, Well, Apple...), Ross West
Unspeakably Absurd (A Is For, Well, Apple...), Ross West
Word Ways
The use of "the_-word" in place of the unspeakable or unprintable crashed through a threshold during the 1988 presidential race. Candidate Bush - not W, but G.H.W. - famously leveled and fired both barrels at opponent Mike Dukakis, accusing him of a willingness to raise the T-word (taxes), as well as labeling him with the graded L-word (liberal). The press corps gushed oceans of ink documenting the usage, decoding the former CIA chief's meanings and speculating on how these jibed with his political V-word, vision.
Kickshaws, David Morice
50 Best Canadian Placename Transpositions, Darryl Francis
50 Best Canadian Placename Transpositions, Darryl Francis
Word Ways
In previous issues of Word Ways, we've had extensive lists of transpositions of place names: US state names, US place names, British place names, and so on. But what about the other country in North America, Canada? Just to show it's not forgotten, here are our fifty longest (and therefore best) Canadian placename transpositions (province abbreviations in parenthesis).
Aeiou(Y) Equations, Susan Thorpe
Aeiou(Y) Equations, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
A survey of word Ways, from its inception in 1968 to the present day, would perhaps give the impression that its contributors have virtually exhausted the exercises centered on the vowels A,E, I, O, U (and Y). Somehow I doubted that. What I can't recall seeing (have I missed it?) is something so obvious that it could well have been overlooked. To me it is quite surprising, and so simple. If we assign A=1, B=2 through Z=26.
Few Say So
Word Ways
Polite, agreeable remarks are often insincere, hiding an opposite meaning. Here are some homophonic antonyms illuminating these poles, a polite pole light or a sincere sin seer. The latter two homophones are from a Willard R. Espy article on "sound charades" in the May 1973 Word Ways. The last nine items below are modified from the same article.
Answers And Solutions
Word Ways
Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.
Super Heavyweights (Part 2), Rex Gooch
Super Heavyweights (Part 2), Rex Gooch
Word Ways
In "Super Heavyweights (Part 1)" in the November 2004 issue of Word Ways, I presented words and phrases with letter sums of 355 through 501 (setting A=1, B=2, etc.). In this article, the continuous run is extended to 547, but samples are given for many numbers above this (including 666!), with the expectation that readers will fill some gaps. Perhaps many could be filled (with varying degrees of satisfaction) by using the plurals of existing items; also, previous writers have often taken a noun (e.g., ending -tomy), then tacked on various verb endings.
More Chemical Element Letter Banks, Rex Gooch
More Chemical Element Letter Banks, Rex Gooch
Word Ways
These examples (out of 221 found) are in response to Darryl Francis' invitation to "fill the gaps" in his list of elements (W03-315). To recap, Darryl asked for words that contain the same letters as the elements, but disregarded the numbers of each letter. Anagrams, a special case, are asterisked. All place names are from the NIMA database. The subject, and related ones, has been treated at length by Dmitri Borgmann (W78-138ff) and Darryl Francis (W77-229).