A letter from the king’s minister of finance to Zenon of Kaunos, a public official in Ptolemaic Egypt, 256 B.C.:

Apollonius to Zenon, greeting. You did right to send the chickpeas to Memphis. Farewell.

In The Complete Plain Words, his 1948 style guide for the British civil service, Sir Ernest Gowers calls this a model of concision.

For Song of the Sky (1954), Guy Murchie collected the names of winds around the world — he calls them “among the least known and most beautiful of words”:

Leste — warm easterly wind of January in the Madeiras
Naalehu — of Hawaii, blowing from the arid interior areas
Soo-oop-wa — bitter sand-laden wind of Southwest Africa
Steppenwind — of Germany blowing from the steppes
Bise — cold wind of France
Southerly burster — of Australia, preceded by an eerie lull
Tramontana — Alpine blast of the Italian east coast
Etesian — of cool summer afternoons in Greece and Levant
Siffanto — up from the hot heel of Italy
Kai — balmy south wind of China
Yamo oroshi — foehn of the steep valleys of Japan
Klod — Balinese wind that blows “downwards to the sea”
Reshabar — lusty and black, out of the high Caucasus
Mistral — down from the Cevennes to the Riviera
Ghost of Gouda — local gust on a calm night, South Africa
Vinds-gnyr — ancient blustery wind of Iceland
Wisper — whistling through narrow Rhine valleys
Imbat — refreshing North African shores
Virazon — cooling Montevideo on summer afternoons
Sz — first faint breeze of the Chinese autumn
Elephanta — of the Malabar coast

“Herodotus tells of the ancient people of Psylli (Tripoli) who became so hysterical when their wells dried up that they actually dclared war on the simoom and marched into the Sahara with clashing cymbals and beating drums until they disappeared forever into a red cloud of whirling sand.”

In the February 1971 issue of Word Ways, Mary J. Youngquist pointed out that when element symbols are expanded, SATED becomes SULFURATED and FEY becomes IRONY.

That August, she, Philip Cohen, and Murray Pearce extended the list:

FEED = IRONED
AGED = SILVERED
SIC = SULFURIC
SNED = TINED
SNY = TINY
SOUS = SULFUROUS
SET = SULFURET
SING = SULFURING
SIZING = SULFURIZING
CUED = COPPERED

Likewise, BASIS yields BASILICONS, NAZI yields NEONAZI (and then NEONEONEONAZI, and so on forever), and RES can yield either RHENIUMS or RESULFUR.

07/09/2026 UPDATE: A number of readers point out that NAZI doesn’t work, as the symbol for neon is Ne. But JAR = JARGON! (Thanks Paul.)

In his 1987 book The Game of Words, Willard R. Espy offered a poem of “forgotten positives”:

I dreamt of a corrigible, nocuous youth,
Gainly, gruntled, and kempt;
A mayed and a sidious fellow, forsooth —
Ordinate, effable, shevelled, ept, couth;
A delible fellow I dreamt.

Correspondingly, he pointed out, many common words ending in -less seem to have no opposites ending in -ful:

A tailful dog, one leaf-ful spring
Set out for toothful foraging,
And as he dug in rootful sod,
Paid voiceful tribute to his God.
At which, a feckful, loveful lass,
Whose strapful bodice charmed each pass-
Erby, cried out, “O timeful sound!
O ageful, lifeful, peerful hound!”

07/09/2026 UPDATE: The New Yorker ran a piece on this theme in 1994. (Thanks, Steve.)