John Chaneski’s Word Olympics quiz is a pantheon of wordplay events, with medals optional and pedantry encouraged. Clues range from two-letter Scrabble-legal surprise sounds to the name for grotesque stone figures that don’t channel rainwater, plus...
It’s the Up Goer Five Challenge! Try to describe something complex using only the thousand most common words in English. It’s a useful mental exercise that’s harder than you might think. Also, if you want to make a room dark, you might turn off the...
How did the word gay go from meaning lighthearted to homosexual? Also, why are elementary schools sometimes called grammar schools? Plus, imeldific, gone pecan, random Scrabble words, and the difference between borrow and lend. And the etiquette of...
Online recaps of Mad Men or Breaking Bad can be as much fun as the shows themselves. So why not recap classic literature — like, say, Dante’s Inferno? A literary website is doing just that. And, you’ve heard about the First World and the Third World...
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...
What makes a word a word? If something’s not in the dictionary, you might not be able to use it in Scrabble. But dictionaries aren’t the last word on whether a word is legitimate. If you use a word that someone else understands, then it’s a word. So...
