jentacular
adj. pertaining to breakfast
Search Results for: in a word
In a Word
hadeharia
n. constant use of the word “hell”
In a Word
wittol
n. a man who knows of and tolerates his wife’s infidelity
Having Words
It’s said that Samuel Johnson resorted to unconventional methods to win a debate with a Billingsgate fishwife:
He called her a noun, a pronoun, an adverb, and she hesitated. He vigorously charged her with being conjunction and preposition. She wavered. And when at length with stentorian voice he accused her to her face of being a parallelopipedon, she broke in disorder and fled in the utmost confusion.
(Frederic Coudert, “Lying as a Fine Art,” 1873.)
Elemental Words
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.)
Unpaired Words
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.)
“Words Without Song”
In 1903, Gilbert Woglom of New York composed “The Tramp’s Gratitude,” a musical composition in which the names of the notes, taken successively, spell out a poem:
A bad-faced, faded, aged cad
Begged a feed, a bed, bedad.
Bedded, fed, a café added,
Bed, bag, baggage, egad, cad cabbaged.
The longest English word that can be spelled with musical note names alone is CABBAGE-FACED.
Charged Words
Electrical terms that Benjamin Franklin appears to have been the first to use, at least in print in English:
- armature
- battery
- brush
- charged
- charging
- condense
- conductor
- discharge
- electrical fire
- electrical shock
- electrician
- electrified
- electrify
- electrized
- Leyden bottle
- minus (negative or negatively)
- negatively
- non-conducting
- non-conductor
- non-electric
- plus (positive or positively)
- stroke (electric shock)
- uncharged
This list is from Carl Van Doren’s 1938 biography. “Though he never lost sight of what was being done in electricity during his whole lifetime, he was perfectly willing to have his contributions to it absorbed in the enlarging science. They were absorbed, and it is now difficult to trace the details of his influence.”
A Few Specific Words
abactor
n. a person who steals livestock
epyllion
n. a little epic
hecatomped
adj. measuring 100 feet square
nouveau pauvre
n. a person who has recently become poor
pogonology
n. a treatise on beards
tessaraglot
adj. written or printed in four languages
transpontine
adj. beyond a bridge
truandise
n. fraudulent begging
(Thanks, Kevin.)
Words and Numbers
Andrzej Bartz offered these “doubly true” alphametics in the May 2017 issue of Word Ways. If the letters in each equation encode digits, what mathematical facts do these expressions represent?
CCCLVI + CCCI + CCLI = CMVIII
ONE + THIRTYNINE + NINETYONE = THREE + NINE + THIRTY + EIGHTYNINE
TWO × TWO + TEN × FIVE = SIX × NINE