Lorelei from Wakefield, Virginia, learned the word nonce from the Spelling Bee game in The New York Times. When she looked up the definition of nonce, she saw it described as an adjective that is coined for or used for one occasion. She found this...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle challenges you to spot the missing links between words. For example, what do the following three names have in common? Jefferson, Franklin, Washington. This is part of a complete episode.
Trinette in Virginia Beach, Virginia, remembers that growing up in Ascension Parish in southern Louisiana, her family would use the phrases dodo the baby or let’s go dodo. Sometimes spelled dodu, the word dodo meaning “sleep” is...
If you know someone with a 20th birthday coming up, you’ll want to tuck this word away in your pocket: vigesimal. It means “having to do with the number 20,” and comes from Latin vigesimus, or “twentieth,” a relative of...
Animals leave their footprints in several English words, including chatoyant, or “shimmering like a cat’s eyes” and sleuth, which is short for sleuth-hound, a kind of bloodhound used for sniffing out prey. Pets have also inspired...
If you want to describe people who have an overly high opinion of themselves, here’s some handy Spanish slang: In Argentina, you might describe such a person as Tarzán de maceta, or “Tarzan of the flowerpot.” You might also call...
