Language and writing
Words about words: punctuation marks, typography, wordplay and the names we give to the parts of language itself.
- Acronym
For as long as English speakers have shortened phrases into initials, like NASA or scuba, they apparently didn't have a word for doing it. "Acronym" wasn't coined until the 1940s, built from Greek roots for "topmost" and "name," meaning the concept is…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Ampersand
The "&" symbol used to be taught as the actual 27th letter of the English alphabet, and schoolchildren reciting it would say "X, Y, Z, and per se and," meaning "and by itself, and." Repeated by enough students enough times, that mouthful slurred into…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 2026 roundup → - Asterisk
Long before footnotes or typos, the "asterisk" was an editor's tool. Around 200 BC, Greek scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium used a small starburst mark to flag duplicate lines while preparing scholarly editions of the Iliad and Odyssey, part of a system of…
From the Tue, Sep 8, 2026 roundup → - Crossword
On December 21, 1913, journalist Arthur Wynne filled space in the New York World's Christmas "Fun" section with a diamond-shaped word grid he called "Word-Cross." A few weeks later, a typesetter swapped the words to "Cross Word," and a second slip dropped the…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Emoji
It looks and sounds like it should come from "emotion" or "emoticon," but "emoji" has nothing to do with either — it's a pure coincidence of sound. The word comes straight from Japanese: e, meaning "picture," plus moji, meaning "character" or "letter." The…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Encyclopedia
The Greeks spoke of "enkyklios paideia," the "circle of learning," the rounded general education that a free citizen was expected to have. Latin writers copying the phrase ran the two words together as though they were one, and the ghost word stuck…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Eponym
Most words in this puzzle describe something named after a person, place, or thing, but this one describes that very act: a word taken from Greek roots meaning upon and name, first used in English in the 19th century for the person or thing that lends its own…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Esperanto
When L. L. Zamenhof published his constructed language in an 1887 booklet, its title just called it "Lingvo Internacia," the international language. Zamenhof signed the booklet with a pen name, "Doktoro Esperanto," which in the language itself means "one who…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Etymology
"Etymology" gets its own name from Greek etymos ("true") plus -logia ("the study of"), reflecting an old Greek belief that a word's original, literal sense was somehow its truest one. Modern etymologists mostly don't buy that theory anymore, but they kept the…
From the Sat, Sep 5, 2026 roundup → - Gazette
In the mid-1500s, during Venice's wars with the Ottoman Empire, the city's government circulated handwritten news sheets that could be read for the price of a small copper coin, the gazeta. The coin's name attached itself to the sheet, and "gazette" reached…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Hashtag
On August 23, 2007, open-source advocate Chris Messina posted a question on Twitter: "how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp?" He pitched the idea to the company directly and was told, in his telling, that "these things are for…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Interrobang
Frustrated that English had no single mark for an excited question, like "You did what?!", advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed a combined symbol in 1962 and named it the "interrobang," blending "interrogation point" with "bang," printer's slang…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 2026 roundup → - Irony
Greek "eironeia" meant feigned ignorance, from "eiron," a dissembler, and it was the name Plato's contemporaries gave to Socrates's habit of pretending to know nothing so that his opponents would talk themselves into a corner. "Irony" entered English in the…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Italics
Italic type, the slanted style used for emphasis, is named directly after Italy. Venetian printer Aldus Manutius introduced it in 1501, designing the compact, cursive-inspired typeface to mimic elegant contemporary handwriting and squeeze more text onto a…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - Limerick
Nobody can fully prove where limerick — the five-line comic verse form — actually got its name. The most repeated story points to a 19th-century parlor game where each guest improvised a nonsense verse and the group sang a chorus ending in "will you come up…
From the Sat, Aug 8, 2026 roundup → - Mnemonic
A mnemonic device, whether it's a rhyme, an acronym, or "Every Good Boy Does Fine," traces back to the ancient Greek root for memory, "mnēmē." That same root shows up, negated, in a word most people would rather not need: "amnesia" simply adds a prefix…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Nickname
A "nickname" started life as an entirely different phrase, mangled by repetition. Middle English had "an eke name" — eke meaning "also," so literally "an also-name," an extra name alongside your real one. Said aloud enough times, the n from "an" drifted onto…
From the Fri, Aug 21, 2026 roundup → - Octothorpe
When Bell Labs added the # key to touch-tone telephone keypads in the 1960s, the engineers needed something to call it, and "octothorpe" is what stuck. The "octo" is easy: the symbol has eight points. The "thorpe" is where the stories diverge. One insider…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Oxymoron
An "oxymoron" — a phrase that yokes together two contradictory ideas, like "deafening silence" or "jumbo shrimp" — gets its name from two Greek words that themselves contradict each other: oxys, "sharp," and moros, "foolish" or "dull." Literally, the word…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - Pamphlet
A "pamphlet" owes its name to an unlikely source: Pamphilus, seu de Amore, a wildly popular 12th-century Latin love poem. Copies of it — cheap, thin, unbound — circulated so widely across medieval Europe that people started using its title, shortened and…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Spoonerism
Reverend William Archibald Spooner, an Oxford don, was apparently so prone to swapping the initial sounds of words that it became a documented tic, turning "a well-oiled bicycle" into "a well-boiled icicle" and similar slips. Whether he actually said most of…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Tabloid
Burroughs, Wellcome & Company registered "Tabloid" as a trademark on March 14, 1884, for its compressed medicine tablets, and defended it fiercely. The press caught the word anyway: on January 1, 1901, Alfred Harmsworth produced a one-day experimental edition…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Trivia
"Trivia" comes from Latin trivium — literally "the place where three roads meet" (*tri-* "three" plus via "road"). In Roman towns, these three-way intersections were natural gathering spots where ordinary people swapped everyday news and casual gossip, which…
From the Thu, Aug 27, 2026 roundup → - Uppercase
In the days of hand-set metal type, a compositor worked from two shallow wooden trays: the small letters, used constantly, sat in the lower tray within easy reach, and the capitals, used far less often, sat in the tray mounted above and behind it. "Uppercase"…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup →