Editor | Jeremiah Farrell |
---|---|
Categories | Recreational linguistics |
Frequency | Quarterly |
Publisher |
|
First issue | 1968 |
Country | USA |
Based in | Indianapolis, Indiana |
Website | digitalcommons |
ISSN | 0043-7980 |
OCLC | 1604435 |
Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics is a quarterly magazine on recreational linguistics, logology and word play. It was established by Dmitri Borgmann in 1968 at the behest of Martin Gardner. [1] [2] [3] [4] Howard Bergerson took over as editor-in-chief for 1969, but stepped down when Greenwood Periodicals dropped the publication. [1] [3] [5] A. Ross Eckler Jr., a statistician at Bell Labs, became editor until 2006, [3] [5] when he was succeeded by Jeremiah Farrell (Butler University). [6]
Word Ways was the first periodical devoted exclusively to word play, and has become the foremost publication in that field. [3] [7] Lying "on the midpoint of a spectrum from popular magazine to scholarly journal", [5] it publishes articles on various linguistic oddities and creative use of language. This includes research into and demonstrations of anagrams, pangrams, lipograms, tautonyms, univocalics, word ladders, palindromes [8] and unusually long words, [4] [5] [9] [10] [11] as well as book reviews, literature surveys, investigations into questionable logological claims, puzzles and quizzes, mnemonics [12] and a small measure of linguistically oriented fiction. [5] [13]
Willard R. Espy discovered Word Ways in 1972, and eventually used material from several dozen articles in his Almanac of Words at Play anthologies. [9] [14] [15] [16] The first of these included complete subscription details for Word Ways, which generated so many inquiries that for decades the publishers were reluctant to change their address. [17]
In the November 2020 issue, editor Jeremiah Farrell announced that the publication of Word Ways would be suspended. [18]
A palindrome is a word, number, phrase, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward, such as madam or racecar. There are also numeric palindromes, including date/time stamps using short digits 11/11/11 11:11 and long digits 02/02/2020. Sentence-length palindromes ignore capitalization, punctuation, and word boundaries.
The National Puzzlers' League (NPL) is a nonprofit organization focused on puzzling, primarily in the realm of word play and word games. Founded in 1883, it is the oldest puzzlers' organization in the world. It originally hosted semiannual conventions in February and September of each year, but conventions are now held annually, in July.
Willard Richardson Espy was an American editor, philologist, writer, poet, and local historian. Raised in the seaside village of Oysterville, Washington, Espy later studied at the University of Redlands in California before becoming an editor in New York City, as well as a contributor to Reader's Digest, The New Yorker, Punch, and other publications.
A. Ross Eckler Jr. was an American logologist, statistician, and author, the son of statistician A. Ross Eckler. He served in the US Army from 1946 – 1947. He received a BA from Swarthmore College with High Honors in 1950 and a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1954.
Darryl Francis is a well-known author of books on Scrabble.
Dmitri Alfred Borgmann was a German-American author best known for his work in recreational linguistics.
Jeremiah (Jerry) Farrell is an American professor emeritus of mathematics at Butler University in Indiana. He is well known for having designed Will Shortz's favorite puzzle, the 1996 "Election Day" crossword in The New York Times. He has also written puzzles for many other books and newspapers, such as Scott Kim's puzzle column for Discover magazine.
Logology is the field of recreational linguistics, an activity that encompasses a wide variety of word games and wordplay. The term is analogous to the term "recreational mathematics".
Ghil'ad Zuckermann is an Israeli-born language revivalist and linguist who works in contact linguistics, lexicology and the study of language, culture and identity. Zuckermann is Professor of Linguistics and Chair of Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He is the president of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies.
Leigh Mercer (1893–1977) was a noted British wordplay and recreational mathematics expert. He is best known for devising the palindrome "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!".
The Palindromist is a magazine devoted to palindromes, published since 1996. Initially it was published biannually. The frequency switched to irregular. It is edited by Mark Saltveit, a Portland-based stand-up comedian who won the first-ever World Palindrome Championship.
Howard William Bergerson was an American writer and poet, noted for his mastery of palindromes and other forms of wordplay.
A panalphabetic window is a stretch of text that contains all the letters of the alphabet in order. It is a special type of pangram or pangrammatic window.
James Albert Lindon was an English puzzle enthusiast and poet specializing in light verse, constrained writing, and children's poetry.
A vocabularyclept poem is a poem which is formed by taking the words of an existing poem and rearranging them into a new work of literature.
Palindromes and Anagrams is a 1973 non-fiction book on wordplay by Howard W. Bergerson.
Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities is a 1965 book written by Dmitri Borgmann.
Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought is a 1967 book written by Dmitri Borgmann.
An eodermdrome is a form of word play wherein a word is formed from a set of letters in such a way that it has a non-planar spelling net. Gary S. Bloom, Allan Gewirtz, John W. Kennedy, and Peter J. Wexler first described the eodermdrome in May 1980, and it subsequently became more widely known after publication in Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics in August 1980.
Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew is a scholarly book written in the English language by linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann, published in 2003 by Palgrave Macmillan. The book proposes a socio-philological framework for the analysis of "camouflaged borrowing" such as phono-semantic matching. It introduces for the first time a classification for "multisourced neologisms", new words that are based on two or more sources at the same time.