At freerice.com, a site that started two months ago, every vocabulary word correctly defined buys 10 grains of rice for the United Nations World Food Program, which distributes food to impoverished third world people in Myanmar, Bangladesh, and so on. All you do is click–it’s free, supported by advertising beneath the vocab words. I’ll forego [...]
flickr:Darwin Bell Gloaming “Twilight.” Actually a noun (nothing ever “gloams,” for example), the word comes from Scottish Middle English and is over 8000 years old. Fungible “Interchangeable” (in that the two fungibles perform the same function). The odd one out in this list. I just love that it sounds like so many other common words [...]
Flickr:Chris Campbell Most people know that oenophiles have their own language to describe the complex flavors in a good glass of wine. What may be more surprising is that the world of coffee has almost as many words. One of my favorite coffee sites, Sweet Maria’s, has a reference guide to all the lingo, but [...]
AskOxford.com asks: “Apart from ‘angry’ and ‘hungry’, what other common English word ends in ‘-gry’?” The answer may surprise you. More: There are no words that rhyme with orange, but what’s the other common English word with no rhymes? The opposite of nocturnal is diurnal, but what do you call animals that come out at [...]
Flickr: laffy4k A long time ago someone suggested I write about color words. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an artist and that most of my color knowledge comes from the Crayola Box of 64. But it’s true, color words are fascinating. For example, vermillion comes from the Latin for “little worm”–there [...]
This is something new for this blog: a plug for a book I have not actually read. But Anu Garg’s newest book, The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words, looks to be pretty great. Anu Garg is the guy behind the A [...]
An old On Language column on the Oxford English Corpus came across my desk today. This is a huge compilation of text from novels, newspaper and magazine articles, blogs and chatrooms, and even spoken transcripts in an ultra-powered searchable database. The corpus allows you to see words in context; for example, as the column says, [...]
The NYT, which usually keeps all but its archival Monday crossword puzzles completely under wraps, is offering a web-only Sunday puzzle this week. It’s “by Lee Iacocca” which in this case means he wrote the clues and somebody else put the grid together. I also wonder if he wrote all the clues, or just the [...]
After finding PBS’s web site for Do You Speak American? I intended to have a long post on this topic, but I’ve been browsing through the material for days and have still found no end to it. It looks as if there was a documentary broadcast on TV back in 2005, and the producers organized [...]
If you stick a stock of liquor in your locker, it is slick to put a lock upon your stock. For some joker who is quicker will rob you of your liquor if you fail to lock your liquor with a lock. I came across this page of tongue twisters by accident yesterday. I love [...]