WORLD WIDE WORDS
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Toploftical This may look and sound like one of those grandiloquent words that arose on the American frontier, alongside sockdolager, hornswoggle, dumfungled, absquatulate, goshbustified and their kin. No, it’s British, dammit! To ...
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Have no truck with The evidence suggests that the expression is actually British. The first example I’ve so far turned up is this: “I think,” said Corney, “we’d better get him up to bed at once?” “Do what yow like,” replied aunt Ann. “It makes no ...
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Marmalise Two World Wide Words subscribers were listening to a broadcast on Australian radio of the cricket test match between their country and New Zealand and heard the commentator use marmalised. They asked me for more ...
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Plat Plat has several senses, one of which dates from the Middle English period and means a small patch of cultivated ground. “Yesterday morning was a sharp frost; and this had set the poor creatures to digging up their little plats of ...
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Flapdoodle “An arbitrary formation”, solemnly state those dictionaries that are not content with the bland and unhelpful “origin unknown”, though they all do give its meaning of nonsense or twaddle. That’s not quite the whole story: the ...
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The next website update
The next update to this site is due on 28 January 2012. You should then be able to read about the yale (the mythical animal, not the university) and the origins of to classic Australianisms, don’t piss in my pocket and don’t come the raw prawn. If you had subscribed to my e-magazine, you would already have seen them, and more.
About World Wide Words
The English language is forever changing. New words appear; old ones fall out of use or change their meanings. World Wide Words tries to record at least some part of this shifting wordscape by featuring new words, word histories, the background to words in the news, and the curiosities of native English speech.
This site is the archive of pieces that have appeared in the free e-magazine. Weekly issues include much more than appears here, including discussion by readers, serendipitous encounters with unfamiliar language, and tongue-in-cheek tut-tuttings at errors perpetrated by sloppy writers.
World Wide Words has been nominated in the Best Website category in the 2011
Love English Awards of
Macmillan Dictionary.