Common Acronym Words

As computerized word lists become readily available to the loglogists, many of the previously difficult problems that have filled the pages of Word Ways become trivial. It is therefore interesting to begin researching problems that cannot be solved with word lists. A dictionary provides four pieces of information about a word: spelling, pronunciation, etymology and meaning. This suggests three types of problems for systematic logological research, in ascending order of difficulty: pronunciation (homophones, refractory rhymes, syllables, etc.), etymology (this article) and meaning (homographs, autantonyms, contronyms, etc.). Although these topics have appeared in Word Ways, they have not received the kind of systematic treatment accorded spelling

Word Records From Webster\u27s Third

This article contains a list of words with interesting logological properties from Merriam-Webster\u27s Third New International Dictionary (1961) and 12000 Words: A Supplement to Webster\u27s Third (1986). Only uncapitalized, unpunctuated, bold-face entries or their inflected forms of covered. Borderline cases are bracketed. The word records are drawn from the following three sources

Modern Nine-Squares

Thousands of nine-squares are known to logology, so one of the remaining challenges is to build them from restricted sources. This article discusses building a nine-square using only words and phrases that are in current use. Consider, for example, the following nine-square

Hard-Working Words

There are about two million words in the English language and exactly twenty-six letters in the English alphabet. Therefore, the average English word should be less than five letters long, since there are over eleven million words that can be spelled with five letters. However, in fact the average length of an English word is around twelve letters

Refractory Rhymes

In the February 1976 Word Ways, Maxey Brooke defines rhyme as the identity in sounds, of the accented vowels of words, usually the last one accented, and of all consonantal and vowel sounds following, with a difference in the sound of the consonants immediately preceding the accented vowels. Masculine rhymes have the final syllable accented, feminine rhymes have the penultimate syllable accented; and triple rhymes have the third-from-last syllable accented. Rhymes with the following consonants somewhat different are called vowel rhyme or assonance; rhymes with identical consonant sounds but slightly different vowel sounds are called off rhyme, sour rhyme, analyzed rhyme or consonance

Funny Plurals

Humor has been defined as the sudden occurrence of the unexpected. A funny (humorous) plural, it follows by logologic, is a plural that ends with an unexpected letter. Since most plurals in English are formed by adding an S to the singular, plurals that end with other letters are funny (strange)

Word Girders

On p 160 of Language on Vacation (1965), Dmitri Borgmann issued the challenge For the logophile who feels the urge to explore virgin territory, word girders are just the thing. A word girder is constructed by exchanging letters between a pair of words to form another pair of words. Borgmann lists three 5-letter examples

Prehistory in Action

Molecular geneticists propose that all living human beings are descendants of a single woman who lived about 350,000 years ago. Evolutionary linguists propose that the cladogram of all human languages follows closely the cladogram of the molecular geneticists. Does it then folow that all of modern English derives from the language spoken by our prehistoric mother? And, if so, how is it that synonyms arise

The Biggest Hoax

The biggest (i.e., longest) word that appears in the Merriam-Webster dictionaries and the Oxford English Dictionary is the 45-letter PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSPICSILICOVOCANOCONIOSIS. It now appears that this word occurs to to a hoax perpetrated by members of the National Puzzlers League. If true, this is surely one of the greatest ironies on the history of logology

How Big is English?

The English language has a complement of somewhere between two million and three million short words ..