Two words from the 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee prep materials: avahi, a term for a woolly lemur of Madagascar, and saltigrade, which describes spiders and other creatures that have feet and limbs adapted for leaping. Saltigrade is...
Louie from Black Hills, South Dakota, recalls the time his girlfriend fell off a paddleboard and into a lake, at which point his father declared She bit the farm! This peculiar locution is most likely his dad’s own combination of two...
In Finland, the term pilkunviilaaja applies to someone who given to hairsplitting. This word for someone who’s “persnickety” literally means “comma-polisher” or “comma-filer.” The Finnish word pilkun means...
Waiting for the other shoe to drop means “anticipating something that has yet to happen.” An old story may explain the origin of this phrase: A man staying in a boarding house is getting ready for bed. He removes one shoe and lets it...
A geographical term from the 2025 Scripps Spelling Bee: Hoofddorp, a commune in the western part of the Netherlands. This is part of a complete episode.
Quiz Guy John Chaneski shares one of this take-off puzzles, where the object is to remove a letter from the beginning from one word to form another word. In this case, the letter is always S. For example, what two words are clued by “The...
