Quaintisms.
These are either quaint, archaic, non-technical, or just plain silly. See copyright notice.
Quaintisms.
These are either quaint, archaic, non-technical, or just plain silly.
Peculiarities.
These include a few different types: words with funny definitions; words with funny
etymologies; words with surprising cognates.
Words with silent
letters. As well as some quasi-methodological argument that silence is real.
Nasty English spelling. For a language poised for international
use, English certainly is not well-spelled.
Anagrams. Collections of words built from the same letters.
Non-adverbs ending in
-ly. Most things that end in "ly" are adverbs. These aren't.
Verbs ending in -ish.
The list, upon reading, has a flavor.
Verbs ending in -er.
These are similar to the -ishes (parallels by portmanteau) but are considerably more
common. A nice list nevertheless.
Verbs ending in
-ort. A must-see!
Past tense of verbs
ending in 'a'. If one can tuba, then has one tubaed or tubad?
More orts. What
else to say?
Fairly long
words without repeating letters. I started this list a long time ago; it's grown since
I wrote a little program to find more.
Relatively
long words with few repeating letters
Words with lots
of adjacent vowels
Fairly long
words having only one vowel
Collections of words
which do not share letters. Rather like "the quick brown fox jumped...", but
without multiple occurrences of letters. English, French, and Russian attempts.
References:
References include the online version of the 1913 Webster's , the 1911 Webster's unabridged, the online edition at Merriam-Webster's web site and others.
Other Dailey word-play:
Hyper-hyphen : a hypertext dictionary
Lexical Command Center:
random crossword puzzles
Other sites: Folks interested in words might also be interested in these links:
Word Ways -- The Journal of Recreational Linguistics -- The home page of the scholarly journal of that name. Includes numerous reviewed articles on topics such as n-isograms, and eodermdromes. Applications to cryptology can be found in many of the issues of the journal.
A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia
-- an extensive, well-documented site built by many contributors, maintained by Jeff Miller of New Port Richey, Florida.Word Play: Sites that feature fun with words -- a collection of links to lots of sites.
Cool Words from the lighter side of language -- a site maintained by Merriam-Webster.
The Text Encoding Initiative -- a project to "develop guidelines for the encoding of textual material in electronic form for research purposes"
The International Phonetic Association -- including pictures of the International Phonetic Alphabet, in common use in many linguistics circles for several decades.
Unicode Home page -- these are the folks designing codes for WWW-based display of all the world's languages
Project Gutenberg a large and pleasant project to deliver public domain electronic texts to the public.
Send comments to David.Dailey@sru.edu .