Bethany in Ithaca, New York, wants a word that sums up a way she’s feeling lately: being desperately lonely, but also reveling in her solitude. She’s toying with her own coinage based on Greek and Latin roots having to do with...
Why does English derive words for some colors, such as blue and orange, from French, but not words for other colors, such as black and white? A fantastic resource about the history of colors is Kassia St. Clair’s The Secret Lives of Color...
Joanne of Port St. Lucie, Florida, has a Scrabble nemesis: zax, a word that once cost her a challenge and later disappeared from the dictionary her friends checked. It is a valid Scrabble word for a roofing tool and a variant of sax, from an Old...

