Untainted Words: ambidextrous, businesswoman, cirronebula, delusional, ….A string of dictionary discoveries followed: To avoid the haggling about the vowel status of “Y,” I decided to consider AEIOUY words separately. These were still the days of the manual search - though computer word lists did exist, if not for the unabridged Webster’s. I took up the mantle, with a full visual pass through the unabridged Webster’s Third. Previous contributors had done similar exercises for other sources. How This Came Upīack in the previous millennium, I asked Ross Eckler - longtime editor of Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics - to suggest some open problems in the field of wordplay.Īt the top of his list was a challenge to find entries for each of the possible orderings of AEIOU in one American English dictionary (5×4×3×2×1 = 120 permutations). And if we at Beyond Wordplay are doing our job, they may lead us to interesting stories we may not have otherwise encountered… beyond the words themselves. Supervocalics engage both our pattern-matching response and the circuits that fire upon recognizing a familiar person (or place or thing).
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