Large word squares are dramatically harder to make than small ones. To date the largest anyone has managed to find are composed of 9-letter words:

Finding a perfect 10×10 word square has been a central goal for wordplay fans for more than 100 years. The task was looking impossible when in 1972 Dmitri Borgmann found an unexpected resource in the African journal of David Livingstone, whose entry for Sept. 26, 1872, reads:

Through forest, along the side of a sedgy valley. Cross its head-water, which has rust of iron in it, then west and by south. The forest has very many tsetse. Zebras calling loudly, and Senegal long claw in our camp at dawn, with its cry, ‘O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o.’

This is exactly what was needed. Given a pen, the yellow-bellied longclaw, Macronyx flavigaster, could have drawn for Livingstone a perfect 10×10 word square:

We ought to consult other species more often. Any longclaw could have given us this contribution — indeed, this is the only word square the bird is capable of making!

sphalm
n. an erroneous doctrine or tenet

“The phrases men are accustomed to repeat incessantly, end by becoming convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence.” — Goethe

“What fresh views would we acquire if we could for once eliminate from our capital of truisms all that is not intrinsic but has accrued through frequent repetition?” — G.C. Lichtenberg

“We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.” — Buckminster Fuller

“Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they might come to be stamped as ‘necessities of thought,’ ‘a priori givens,’ etc. The path of scientific progress is often made impassable for a long time by such errors.” — Albert Einstein

“It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” — Alfred North Whitehead

AMBIDEXTROUS is ambidextrous — its first half draws on the first half of the alphabet, its second on the second.

philonoist
n. a lover of knowledge

inscient
n. ignorant; lacking knowledge

philalethist
n. a lover of the truth

“Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.” — Sydney Smith

From a letter from Ben Franklin to John Lining of South Carolina, March 18, 1755:

I find a frank acknowledgment of one’s ignorance is not only the easiest way to get rid of a difficulty, but the likeliest way to obtain information, and therefore I practice it: I think it an honest policy. Those who affect to be thought to know every thing, and so undertake to explain every thing, often remain long ignorant of many things that others could and would instruct them in, if they appeared less conceited.

Write out the phrase “expect the devil.”

Extract the Roman numerals: eXpeCt the DeVIL

Add these: D (500) + C (100) + L (50) + X (10) + V (5) + I (1)

The total is 666.

lectual
adj. confining to the bed (“a lectual disease”)

bechic
n. a cough medicine

lambitive
n. a medicine to be licked, such as a cough drop

nullipara
n. a childless woman

vagitus
n. a newborn child’s cry

deiparous
adj. giving birth to a god