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Original Essays | November 9, 2009

Jesse Bullington: IMG Abash'd the Devil Stood

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I don't believe in evil. It's a word I use, certainly, because words are shortcuts and we all take the short way round from time to time, but that's... Continue »
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Another Word a Day: An All-New Romp Through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English

by Anu Garg

Another Word a Day: An All-New Romp Through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English Cover

ISBN13: 9780471718451
ISBN10: 0471718459
Condition: Standard
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A smorgasbord of surprising, obscure, and exotic words

In this delightful encore to the national bestseller A Word A Day, Anu Garg, the founder of the wildly popular A Word A Day Web site (wordsmith.org), presents an all-new collection of unusual, intriguing words and real-life anecdotes that will thrill writers, scholars, and word buffs everywhere. Another Word A Day celebrates the English language in all its quirkiness, grandeur, and fun, and features new chapters ranging from "Words Formed Erroneously" and "Red-Herring Words" to "Kangaroo Words," "Discover the Theme," and "What Does That Company Name Mean?" In them, you'll find a treasure trove of curious and compelling words, including agelast, dragoman, mittimus, nyctalopia, quacksalver, scission, tattersall, and zugzwang. Each entry includes a concise definition, etymology, and usage example, interspersed with illuminating quotations.

Praise for a word a day

"Anu Garg's many readers await their A Word A Day rations hungrily. Now at last here's a feast for them and other verbivores. Eat up!"

—Barbara Wallraff, Senior Editor at The Atlantic Monthly and author of Word Court

"AWADies will be familiar with Anu Garg's refreshing approach to words: words are fun and they have fascinating histories."

—John Simpson, Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary

Synopsis:

This is the sequel to  Anu Garg's popular  A Word a Day    based on his 600,000-subscriber website. Garg, then a graduate student in computer sciences, began in 1994 A Word A Day (AWAD), a website and free daily e-mail service that offers subscribers a new words every day, with a definition, etymology, example sentency and commentary.  Each week has a different theme — from Greek Mythology to Words from Film — and at the end of the month, he sends out a newsletter with feedback and commentary  from his subscribers.

For  Another Word a Day, Garg will again offer 52 chapters of unusual, exotic, and interesting words, grouped by theme, such as Words Borrowed from Yiddish, Words Formed Erroneously, Red-Herring Words. 

Synopsis:

A smorgasbord of surprising, obscure, and exotic words

In this delightful encore to the national bestseller A Word A Day, Anu Garg, the founder of the wildly popular A Word A Day Web site (wordsmith.org), presents an all-new collection of unusual, intriguing words and real-life anecdotes that will thrill writers, scholars, and word buffs everywhere. Another Word A Day celebrates the English language in all its quirkiness, grandeur, and fun, and features new chapters ranging from Words Formed Erroneously and Red-Herring Words to Kangaroo Words, Discover the Theme, and What Does That Company Name Mean? In them, you'll find a treasure trove of curious and compelling words, including agelast, dragoman, mittimus, nyctalopia, quacksalver, scission, tattersall, and zugzwang. Each entry includes a concise definition, etymology, and usage example, interspersed with illuminating quotations.

Praise for a word a day

Anu Garg's many readers await their A Word A Day rations hungrily. Now at last here's a feast for them and other verbivores. Eat up

--Barbara Wallraff, Senior Editor at The Atlantic Monthly and author of Word Court

AWADies will be familiar with Anu Garg's refreshing approach to words: words are fun and they have fascinating histories.

--John Simpson, Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary

Synopsis:

In 1994, Anu Garg began A Word A Day (AWAD), a free e-mail service that delivers a new word every weekday, accompanied by a definition, etymology, sample usage, and commentary. Each week has a different theme, and at the end of the week, Garg sends out a newsletter with enthusiastic feedback from the more than half-million AWAD subscribers around the world. Now, in this encore to the national bestseller A Word A Day, Garg offers 52 new delightfully themed chapters-ranging from "Words Formed Erroneously" and "Words of Horse-related Origins" to "Words Borrowed from Yiddish" and "Red-Herring Words." In them, readers will discover a treasure trove of 260 curious and compelling new words, including agelast, bissextile, cockamamie, cumshaw, disembogue, dragoman, fartlek, manitou, mittimus, nyctalopia, quacksalver, scission, sennight, tattersall, yegg, zaftig, and zugzwang. For A Word A Day subscribers and word buffs everywhere, this book will make the perfect gift.
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About the Author

ANU GARG is the founder of wordsmith.org, an online community of more than 600,000 word lovers in 200 countries, now in its twelfth year. He is the author of the bestselling book A Word A Day (Wiley). Garg speaks frequently about words and language internationally.
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What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
Debra Hamel, August 31, 2006 (view all comments by Debra Hamel)
Anu Garg has been sending out his A Word a Day mailings to his linguaphilic subscriber base--some half a million strong at this point--for more than a decade. Another Word a Day is the second book to spring from this enterprise. (His A Word a Day was published in 2002.) In it Garg follows the format of his subscription list. The book is divided into 52 thematic chapters: calendar-related words (bissextile), words that are apparent misspellings of other words (monestrous), words about words (hyperbole), and so on. Garg discusses five words per chapter, providing for each its pronunciation, syntax, etymology, definition, and an example, usually culled from some modern source, of the word in print. (For example, for the word cruciverbalist Garg uses a passage from Booklist discussing Parnell Hall's series of crossword mysteries.) A quote from some famous person appears at the bottom of most pages of the book--though these quotes aren't relevant to the words under discussion in the text. Each chapter also includes a number of responses from readers of Garg's mailings. These are set off in boxes, which serves to break up what would otherwise be a monotonous layout. They are also sometimes rather interesting--for example, the seventeen different explanations Garg's readers offered for the origin of the term eighty-six as a verb meaning "to throw out." And a Seattle reader draws a nice parallel between hapax legomena (words with only one recorded use) and Googlewhacking:

Hapax Legooglemenon
"A recent variant on finding singularity in a large corpus, namely the sport, pastime, and occasional obsession of Googlewhacking. You challenge the awesome indexing capabilities of Google.com to find that elusive query (two words--no quotation marks) with a single, solitary result!"
-- Mike Pope, Seattle, Washington

You'll be happy to become acquainted with some of the words and etymologies in Garg's corpus--dasypygal means "having hairy buttocks"; "helpmeet" comes from an erroneous interpretation of a Biblical passage.You'll be happy to become acquainted with some of the words and etymologies in Garg's corpus--dasypygal means "having hairy buttocks"; "helpmeet" comes from an erroneous interpretation of a Biblical passage. Some of the entries are less compelling. I most enjoyed the more conversational parts of the book, the reader responses already mentioned and the brief discussions with which Garg introduces each chapter. I would have enjoyed the book as a whole more if the entries included lengthier discussions--more on a word's history in popular culture, perhaps, memorable anecdotes attached to the words, however tangentially--but I realize that that is not the format Garg follows in his mailings.

Linguaphiles will enjoy Another Word a Day, but reading it straight through is not recommended except to the most voracious verbivore: this is more of a book you'll want to nibble on from time to time.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780471718451
Subtitle:
An All-New Romp Through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English
Author:
Garg, Anu
Publisher:
John Wiley & Sons
Subject:
Communication
Subject:
English language
Subject:
Vocabulary
Subject:
Word Lists
Subject:
Alphabet
Copyright:
2005
Publication Date:
September 2005
Binding:
Paperback
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
226
Dimensions:
8.50x5.55x.59 in. .69 lbs.
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