Words, letters & where they come from

Essays on the machinery of English — how words get made, borrowed, mangled, played with, and priced by the tile. New posts from the word desk every couple of weeks.

BORROWED WORDS Beautiful “untranslatable” words — and what English does when it wants them Schadenfreude, hygge, saudade: what “untranslatable” really means, and how English quietly absorbs the words it loves. Marcus Webb · JUL 28 · 7 MIN

WORD GAMES Is that a real word? Scrabble dictionaries vs. the ones on your shelf QI is good on the board and odd at dinner. How game dictionaries differ from desk dictionaries — and what “real word” actually means. June Calloway · JUL 22 · 7 MIN

WORDPLAY Anagrams, palindromes & pangrams: a field guide to letter play The four great species of alphabet games, their greatest hits, and why constraints have obsessed writers for two thousand years. Marcus Webb · JUL 16 · 8 MIN

LETTERS J, Q, X, Z: life with the rarest letters in English Z appears in fewer than 1 in 1,000 letters of English text. Why the rare letters starve — and why word games price them like gold. June Calloway · JUL 11 · 7 MIN

WORD ORIGINS Folk etymology: word origin stories too good to be true Posh is not an acronym and no king knighted a steak. The most persistent false origins — and how the myths reshape real words. Marcus Webb · JUL 6 · 8 MIN

LEXICOGRAPHY How new words actually get into the dictionary Nobody votes words in. Citation files, corpora, and the evidence a word needs before lexicographers write it down. June Calloway · JUN 30 · 7 MIN

WORD RECORDS The longest words in English (and what counts as a word, anyway) From antidisestablishmentarianism to the engineered 45-letter lung disease — and why the record will never be settled. Marcus Webb · JUN 24 · 8 MIN

SOUND & SENSE Why some words feel so good to say: the science of sound symbolism Mellifluous earns its reputation. Bouba/kiki, phonesthemes, and the quiet physics of words that sound like what they mean. June Calloway · JUN 18 · 6 MIN