World Wide Words

NEW FROM THE E-MAGAZINE THIS WEEK

Acersecomic The legitimacy of this word rests entirely on two appearances in dictionaries, in 1623 and 1656. It seems never to have been used seriously and ever since has been held up as an example of an odd word, in modern times in ...
[Read the whole piece]

Deleb The trouble with having some famous person endorsing your products or even becoming associated with them by accident is that they can — and often will — say or do things that adversely affect your reputation. How good it would be ...
[Read the whole piece]

Muggins As you say, it’s usually said by a person about himself, as a slightly bitter indication that he feels he has allowed himself to be exploited: “But did the MP offer to put the fare on his expenses? Aye, right. He stepped ...
[Read the whole piece]

RANDOMLY CHOSEN

Pitmatic Its name is hardly remembered even in the area in which it was once best known, though it has received attention from dialectologists and was featured in Melvyn Bragg’s The Routes of English BBC Radio 4 series back in ...
[Read the whole piece]

RECENTLY ADDED PAGES

Witching hour; Two Brewer's Dictionaries; Colcannon Night; Tabnabs; Talaria; Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary; Pico-projector; Monkey wrench; Epigenome; Garth; Grasp the nettle; Punchline; Scrumping; Collapse of stout party; Hard lines; Abditory; Herf; Writing and Script; Agrestic; It’s All in a Word; Jorum; Topsy-turvy; Past master; The F Word; Pandiculation; Bitter end; How to Promote your Dictionary; Ostrobogulous; Dozenal; Terrific; Freelance.

THE NEXT WEB SITE UPDATE

The next update is due on 21 November, when you should be able to read about the extremely rare word niddering, the story behind the simile bull in a china shop and whatever else turns up in the next seven days that looks interesting.

MY NEW BOOK

The cover of Michael Quinion's book 'Why is Q Always Followed by U?'

Not only a new book, but the first to be published by Particular Books, a new imprint of Penguin. The title question is just one of 200 that I answer. Each began life on this Web site and its associated e-magazine but every one has been freshly researched to find facts not available when the answer was first written. Such is the pace of etymological discovery, in fact, several had to be rewritten a second time to include new information that came to light during the writing of the book. Most are illustrated by annotated quotations to help readers understand how the words and phrases evolved and to place them in their historical and social context. Find out more or learn what the American lexicographer Erin McKean thinks of the book.

[Michael Quinion, Why is Q Always Followed by U? Word-perfect Answers to the Most-asked Questions about Language, published by Particular Books, an imprint of Penguin Books; hardback, 352pp; publisher’s UK list price £12.99. ISBN-13: 978-1-846-14184-3; ISBN-10: 1-846-14184-2.]

OR TRY MY PREVIOUS BOOKS ...

SIC!

• “I learned a new word this week,” wrote Randall Bart, “then I had to unlearn it. In an article on Problembär, the people supporting the reintroduction of bears in Italy and Austria were referred to as ambientalists. Was it a new word for people who support the reintroduction of species? I eventually determined that it’s the Italian word for environmentalist (ambientalista) mistranslated.”

• In the “brevity is the soul of wit” department, Brian Mason noticed a sentence in the section of a pamphlet giving the biographies of candidates for the board of directors of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives: “[He] now writes for the one-line journal theTyee.ca.”

• On 6 November, Lesley Beresford spotted a headline on Google News which came from the Brisbane Times, Australia: “Drink driver caught 19 times over the limit”. Lesley commented, “I was amazed somebody with a blood alcohol level of 0.95 could still breathe, let alone drive. Closer examination of the story revealed that it was the nineteenth time the same chap had been caught!”

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

This site is designed to work with the current generation of browsers. Some older ones might not be able to display every aspect of the design as it is intended to look, nor some of the special characters. If you want to download an updated browser, we recommend Firefox 3.5.

The main text on every page is best viewed using Microsoft’s Georgia font. If you do not have it on your system, you can download it for Windows or the Apple Mac.

Pronunciations are given in IPA symbols; to view these requires you to have a font on your system that includes them, such as Lucida Sans Unicode, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL or Arial Unicode MS. If you can read this (/mɛtɛmpˈtəʊsɪs/) as IPA you have a suitable font already installed. The site preference is for Lucida Sans Unicode (click on the font name to download the version for Microsoft Windows). See your system help files for how to install fonts.