In the runup to Thailand’s 2001 elections, Thai Rak Thai party founder Thaksin Shinawatra faced allegations of corruption. The Bangkok Post‘s “week in review” email examined the charges against him, his attempts avoid the media, his reputation, and the Internet’s reaction. It used these paragraph headings:

Thaksin cited
Thaksin sighted
Thaksin slighted
Thaksin sited

In Indexers and Indexes in Fact and Fiction, Hazel K. Bell writes, “Clearly the editor is an indexer manqué.”

aeolistic
adj. long-winded

[Edmund] Falconer’s Oonagh, or, The Lovers of Lismona opened one evening in 1866 at half-past seven. By midnight most of the audience had left; by two o’clock in the morning only a few sleeping critics were still there. At three o’clock the stage crew brought the curtain down with the action still in progress and the play was taken off.

— The Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre, 2013

The word cliché was originally the French name for a printing plate that was prepared for convenience to print a commonly used phrase. The plates clicked as they were being used, and cliché is the past participle of clicher, a variant of cliquer, “to click.”

Interestingly, another name for this plate is stereotype.

aristology
n. the art or “science” of dining

agamy
n. absence of marriage; the state or condition of being unmarried

viripotent
adj. (of a woman) physically fit for marriage

affidation
n. sworn confirmation of one’s intent to marry

deuterogamy
n. marriage a second time

In the November 2009 issue of Word Ways, Richard Lederer lists his favorite “eye rhymes” — if English made any sense, these would sound alike:

• hoist–soloist
• unit–whodunit
• cared–infrared
• stately–philately
• radios–adios
• only–wantonly
• overage–coverage

Even worse: beat–great–sweat–caveat–whereat and bough–dough–enough–hiccough– lough–through–trough–thorough.

And shouldn’t encourage rhyme with entourage?

12/15/2015 A related image, from reader Jon Jerome:

Eight ways to pronounce the letter X, from wordplay maven Dmitri Borgmann:

eks: x-ray
gz: exist
gzh: luxurious
kris: Xmas
ks: sex
ksh: anxious
z: xylophone
__: faux pas

He adds three more: According to Webster’s Second Edition, xeres is an alternate name for sherry wine in which the X can be pronounced either as H or as SH. And arguably the X in except is pronounced like the letter K, as “the sibilant portion of the usual X sound has fused with the sound of the C immediately following.” If we accept these, then the total rises to 11.

(Dmitri A. Borgmann, “The Ultimate Homonym Group,” Word Ways 17:4 [November 1984], 224-228.)