- Ajoritsedabi Oreghoyeyere Memaridieyin Okorodudu played basketball for Bucknell in 1980.
- Spike Milligan said his father’s last word was “Aaargh!”
- It’s illegal to take a lion to the movies in Baltimore.
- In 2007 the UK Association of Chief Police Officers’ spokesman on knife crime was named Alfred Hitchcock.
- “I banged the door with such a slam, / It sounded like a wooden d–n.” — Frederick Locker-Lampson
Search Results for: in a word
Descent
Bycocket is an obsolete word for a kind of cap or headdress. Its entry in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains this woeful note:
Through a remarkable series of blunders and ignorant reproductions of error, this word appears in modern dictionaries as ABACOT. In Hall’s Chron. a bicocket appears to have been misprinted abococket, which was copied by Grafton, altered by Holinshed to abococke, and finally ‘improved’ by Abraham Fleming to abacot (perhaps through an intermediate abacoc); hence it was again copied by Baker, inserted in his Glossarium by Spelman, and thence copied by Phillips, and so handed down through Bailey, Ash, Todd, etc., to 19th century dictionaries (some of which provide a picture of the ‘abacot’), and even inserted in dictionaries of English and foreign languages.
The OED defines abacot as a “variant of bycocket”.
A Curious Letter
In 1768, Benjamin Franklin proposed a new alphabet, warning that without a phonetic scheme to stabilize spelling and pronunciation, “our writing will become the same with the Chinese as to the difficulty of learning and using it.” He composed this letter as a sample of his idea:
He explains everything (and answers the imagined objections above) in this essay.
06/03/2026 UPDATE: Reader Jason Taff notes:
The word ‘I’ is pronounced as a diphthong in English, and it’s transcribed as such in that text. But the first vowel of the diphthong in the text matches the ‘schwa’ vowel in the last syllable of ‘Kensington’, whereas modern English pronounces that first sound to match the sound in the word ‘not’ (which appears later in the text).
This is precisely a remnant of what’s called the Great English Vowel Shift that separates Chaucerian English from Shakespearean English. It had started in Shakespeare’s time (1600’s), but hadn’t fully progressed to its modern version in Franklin’s time (1700’s). This text is a snapshot record of that change in progress!
(Thanks, Jason.)
One World
Al-longs, ong-fong der lar Part-ree-e-yer,
Ler joor der glwore ait arr-ee-vay.
— Lyrics to La Marseillaise rendered in phonetic French for British soldiers in World War I, from Frank Scudamore’s “Parley Voo”!!, 1915 (via Tony Augarde’s Wordplay, 2011)
Mouthful
In 1641, a syndicate of Puritan clergymen published a pamphlet upholding the Presbyterian theory of the ministry.
They published it under the memorable pseudonym Smectymnuus, an acronym derived from the initials of the five authors: Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstowe.
The Oxford English Dictionary still recognizes the wonderful word Smectymnuan, meaning any of these authors or one who accepted their views.
Dark Matter
Merriam-Webster points out something I’d never noticed: In many languages, the word for night consists of the word for eight preceded by the letter N:
English: N + eight = Night
German: N + acht = Nacht
French: N + huit = Nuit
Spanish: N + ocho = Noche
Italian: N + otto = Notte
Portuguese: N + oito = Noite
It’s a coincidence. Romance languages derive their words for eight and night from the Latin octo and noctem, and the Germanic languages get them from the Old High German ahto and the Germanic naht. In each case the similarity of the sounds is just happenstance.
(Thanks, Sharon.)
Snunkoople
In each of these pairs of nonsense words, which is funnier?
- quingel vs. heashes
- prousup vs. mestins
- finglam vs. cortsio
- witypro vs. octeste
- rembrob vs. sectori
- pranomp vs. anotain
- fityrud vs. tessina
If you’re like most people, you’ll find the first word in each pair funnier than the second. In a 2015 study, University of Alberta psychologist Chris Westbury found that the difference is explained surprisingly well by Shannon entropy, which here measures the unlikelihood of each combination of letters: Outlandish specimens such as yuzz-a-ma-tuzz, oobleck, truffula, and sneetch, all from Dr. Seuss, seem funnier than, say, clester, which might plausibly be a real word. (Schopenhauer had argued that humor results from the violation of expectations.)
“The results show that the bigger the difference in the entropy between the two words, the more likely the subjects were to choose the way we expected them to,” Westbury said. Indeed, the most accurate subject chose correctly 92 percent of the time. “To be able to predict with that level of accuracy is amazing. You hardly ever get that in psychology, where you get to predict what someone will choose 92 percent of the time.”
Interestingly, Westbury had to omit vulgar-sounding nonwords (whong, dongl, shart, focky, clunt) before he even got started — these were so consistently considered funny that they would have interfered with the rest of the examination.
(Chris Westbury, et al., “Telling the World’s Least Funny Jokes: On the Quantification of Humor as Entropy,” Journal of Memory and Language 86 [2016]: 141-156.)
The Silver Rule
“When asked by a disciple if there were one single word which could serve as a principle of conduct for life, Confucius replied, ‘Perhaps the word reciprocity will do. Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.'” — Analects
“To a Lost Sweetheart”
When Whistler’s Mother’s Picture’s frame
Split, that sad morn, in two,
Your tense words scorched me like a flame —
You shrieked, “Ah, glue! Get glue!”
O Glue! O God! there was not glue
Enough in all the feet
Of all the kine the wide world through
To hold you to me, Sweet!
A Union Cipher
This baffling message illustrates a cipher adopted by the Union Army in 1862:
TO GEORGE C. MAYNARD, Washington
Regulars ordered of my to public out suspending received 1862 spoiled thirty I dispatch command of continue of best otherwise worst Arabia my command discharge duty of my last for Lincoln September period your from sense shall duties the until Seward ability to the I a removal evening Adam herald tribune.
PHILIP BRUNER
The address and signature are “covers” that don’t enter into the cipher. The first word, Regulars, is a code indicating that the original message had been written in five columns of nine words each. Tribune, herald, spoiled, Seward, for, and worst are null words; Lincoln is code for Louisville, Kentucky; Adam means General Henry Wager Halleck; and Arabia is code for Major General Don Carlos Buell. The word Period indicates a full stop. This had been the original message:
Louisville, Kentucky September thirty 1862 General Halleck: (Adam) (period) I received last evening your dispatch suspending my removal from command. Out of a sense of public duty, I shall continue to discharge the duties of my command to the best of my ability until otherwise ordered. D.C. Buell, Major General
This message had been enciphered by reading up the fourth column, down the third, up the fifth, down the second, and up the first; inserting the null words; and encoding the most sensitive particulars. The system worked well until July 1864, when Union cipher operator Stephen L. Robinson was captured by Confederate guerrillas and the key seized.
(John Laffin, Codes and Ciphers Secret Writing Through the Ages, 1964.)