beta
n.— «Gunstone wrote and published “The Traveler’s Guide to Washington Rock Climbing” and was widely known as “Beta,” a term used by rock climbers to refer to good information on a route.» —“David Christopher Gunstone” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Minn.) June 6, 2003. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...