Jay in Barre, Vermont, asks: If someone is passionate about conservation, they’re called a conservationist, but if someone is passionate about conversation, they’re a conversationalist. Why the extra syllable in conversationalist? This...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle features sentences that include a short word that anagrams to another word, and is defined by yet another word in the sentence. For example, if the clue is I can get no research done because the room is so...
All the answers to this puzzle from Quiz Guy John Chaneski are two-word phrases, and the only vowel they contain is the letter A. For example, suppose John is lounging in a shaded spot where only one variety of fruit is allowed. Where is he? This is...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s brain-buster involves changing the meaning of proverb by anagramming one of its words. For example, John says his friend owned a string of pottery franchises, but it all came to nothing when one of the ovens fell...
Remlap, Alabama, and Trebloc, Mississippi, are examples of ananyms—names formed by spelling a word backward, making them a kind of anagram. In the case of the Alabama town, it’s named after the Palmer family, and the Mississippi town is named for a...
Engineer and language enthusiast Anu Garg runs a popular website, Wordsmith.org, which includes the A.Word.A.Day email, along with an anagram server, and other offerings for fellow word lovers. To celebrate the site’s 25th anniversary, Garg...