Crosswordese: A Guide to the Weird and Wonderful Language of Crossword Puzzles (Bookshop|Amazon) by puzzle constructor David Bukszpan is a cruciverbalist’s delight, full of crossword lore and puzzle-solving tips, plus a dozen puzzles that...
Crossword puzzles are great mental exercise, partly because they’re less about how much you know and more about whether you can think creatively about what you already know. For example, what’s the three-letter answer to the clue It has...
In the 19th century, the Oxford English Dictionary was a bit like the Wikipedia of its day, in that much of its information was crowdsourced, gathered by thousands of volunteers. Linguist and lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie tells the stories of many of...
Robert Charles Hope, inventor of the crank used to adjust the tension on a tennis net, is among thousands of readers who in the late 19th century responded to a call from the Oxford English Dictionary to send in citations for notable words they...
For many of us, religious liturgy provides the words we need for life’s major milestones. But what if you don’t ascribe to any particular religion? In her uplifting new book, The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and...
Shaun Usher has collected many marvelous epistles in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (Bookshop|Amazon). One of them, from E. B. White, is a thoughtful letter of encouragement urging the reader to “wind the clock...