WORLD WIDE WORDS
New this week
Cantankerous I was looking at this word in some book or other a while ago — my ageing memory fails to remind me which — and wondered how such a collection of letters could have come together to make an adjective that meant ...
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Dictionary of American Regional English It is one of the hallmarks of lexicography that those who engage in it are destined for the long haul. A marked tendency exists for the initiators of dictionary projects to suffer the fate of ...
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Omnishambles A rather splendid word entered the UK political lexicon in 2012. It was uttered in the House of Commons during Prime Minister’s Questions on 18 April by the Labour leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband. He called the ...
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Randomly chosen
Ethnic A headline in the Times of London just before Christmas read: “Leicester to be first city with ethnic majority”. It sounds daft since, when you think about it, most cities have an ethnic majority of one sort or another. But that wasn’t ...
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Recently added pages
Quinion; At the drop of a hat; Tosticated; Tin Pan Alley; Zemblanity; Rozzer; Sooth; Sentence-initial and; Roscid; Jack; Ambulance at the bottom of the cliff; Festucine; Nerd; Froward; Imposthume; Etiquette; Perfect storm; Somniloquent; God willing and the creek don’t rise; Playing gooseberry; Alamagoozlum; Odd-shoe boy; Halt; Human safari; Putter or potter; Standing pie; The Words of Dickens; Fandangle; Yale; Haywire; Devo-max; Have no truck with; Two Australian expressions; Toploftical; Marmalise.
The next website update
World Wide Words is on holiday for two weeks. The next update to this site is due on 27 May 2012. You should then be able to read about the utterly archaic ludibrious, and consider the origins of the idiom no room to swing a cat. 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.