Oxford Word Challenge is an enjoyable and stimulative mixture of entertainment and educative material, consisting of quizzes and puzzles for the reader to solve. The author, Tony Augarde, has created a wide variety of different word challenges for readers to try, including anagrams, acronyms,cryptic crossword clues, devil's dictionary, doublets, hermans, kangaroo words, palindromes, rebuses, spoonerisms, and stinky pinky. The first section allows readers to enjoy some comparatively easy questions: e.g. Which two rhyming words could mean 'an amusing rabbit'? Can you name a dozen trees starting with S? When you've warmed up, these fairly difficult questions will test you further: e.g. Which word means to open and to shut? Which actor has genuine class? Finally, you can take on the challenge of the fiendishly difficult problems! e.g. Which words have all the vowels in order? What is a boomslang, a demirep, a qualtagh, or a zugzwang? An answers section at the back of the book not only gives solutions, but also adds relevant background information wherever possible, including word origins and interesting stories about how words are used.

An irresistible collection for anyone who likes to test their mental wits with verbal acrobatics. Illustrated.

With its wide range of games for all tastes and occasions, and its infectious style, The Oxford A to Z of Word Games is the book for word games players of all ages, and will soon make an enthusiast of even the most reluctant word-gamer.

Examines the hidden history through which the Oxford English Dictionary came into being in a study that traces the personal battles involved in chronicling an ever-changing language.

If you stumble over your new mat in the passage, what science are you shown to have neglected? Pneumatics. Charades, hangman, anagrams, tongue-twisters, and new for this edition, games based on text messaging: dozens of fun and fiendish word games jostle for space in this updated edition of Tony Augarde's classic guide. From the highbrow riddle to the lowly pun, The Oxford Guide to Word Games provides a comprehensive history of verbal wit and wordplay. Organized thematically, thebook examines twenty-six forms of word game in absorbing detail, including their history, and provides entertaining examples throughout. From Scrabble and Spoonerisms, Crosswords and Chronograms to Playing with Poetry, neither the crossword addict nor the student of linguistics and lexicography will be able to resist!

This brand new edition of the highly successful Oxford Crossword Dictionary still draws on the authority of The Concise Oxford Dictionary and The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary, and will provide crossword lovers with everything there is to know about how to solve crosswords. There are over 250,000 entries, alphabetically arranged by word-length for easy look-up, and the list of words has been fully updated for this edition to include up-to-the-minute words. The lists include not only standard English, but also foreign words, phrases, idioms, obsolete words, and irregular forms, which usually appear in word game clues. To help you answer general knowledge clues, list have been fully updated and reorganized for this edition so that finding the answers to clues are made easy. New lists have been introduced, including food and drink, plants and animals, and computer games. Lists of famous people in the arts, historical and political figures, monarchs, presidents, sports personalities, and writers will help you solve biographical clues. A new long introduction by Michael Macdonald-Cooper, compiler of crosswords for The Independent, is required reading for all crossword enthusiasts. It gives a fascinating history of both British and American crosswords, and details of the origins of cryptic crosswords, with practical advice on how to solve them.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review “A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men. As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages. Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world. WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARD

Can you drink a glass of balderdash? What do you call the part of a dog's back it can't scratch? And if, serendipitously, you find yourself in Serendip, then where exactly are you? The answers to all of these questions -- and a great many more -- can be found in the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive record of the English language. And there is no better guide to the dictionary's many wonderments than the former chief editor of the OED, John Simpson. Simpson spent almost four decades of his life immersed in the intricacies of our language, and guides us through its history with charmingly laconic wit. In The Word Detective, an intensely personal memoir and a joyful celebration of English, he weaves a story of how words come into being (and sometimes disappear), how culture shapes the language we use, and how technology has transformed not only the way we speak and write but also how words are made. Throughout, he enlivens his narrative with lively excavations and investigations of individual words -- from deadline to online and back to 101 (yes, it's a word) -- all the while reminding us that the seemingly mundane words (can you name the four different meanings of ma?) are often the most interesting ones. But Simpson also reminds us of the limitations of language: spending his days in the OED's house of words, his family at home is forced to confront the challenges of wordlessness. A brilliant and deeply humane expedition through the world of words, The Word Detective will delight and inspire any lover of language.

The word is central to both naive and expert theories of language. Yet the definition of 'word' remains problematic. The 42 chapters of this Handbook offer a variety of perspectives on this most basic and elusive of linguistic units.