Lucy Mangan takes a look at your recent word submissions before Easter hits

How have we left it this far into the American president-picking process to enjoy the fact that the archaic English word “trumpery” means “nonsense; something without use or value”, “showy and worthless” or any combination of the above. The only way it could be improved would be if someone went… Read More

It’s World Book Day and Lucy Mangan looks at some really ‘conooper’ word submissions from Moville Community College

In celebration of World Book Day we have a special delivery today, from the students at Moville Community College in Donegal. Kay Ward and her students were looking at poetic techniques in class and talking about why poets use certain words instead of others and even sometimes make them up. Read More

‘Project Fear’, ‘Feel the Bern’, and ‘Titan Secondaries’: February’s Words in the News

If I told you about a forthcoming referendum on whether a certain country should remain in a certain political union, and that the campaign to leave this union had branded the campaign to stay in Project Fear, you’d probably assume I was talking about Scotland in 2014. But in… Read More

What’s all the snoise about? Lucy Mangan looks at some of your recent word submissions

Forgive me if I am not quite myself at the moment. I am heavily involved in a friend’s ‘wedmin’. She introduced me to the word and consequently the plethora of miseries it covers. It’s short for ‘wedding administration’, regarding which there are no other abbreviations, short cuts, abridgement, truncations, condensations,… Read More

Etymology corner – We take a look at the word ‘Leap’, on the run up to Leap Day

As you will no doubt be aware, the current year has an extra day inserted at the end of February, making it a ‘leap year’. The word ‘leap’ developed from the Anglo-Saxon verb hlēapan. It is one of several words of Germanic origin that in Early English began with the… Read More

Did we give up new words with the wine this dry January?

This year’s Dry January was not just the annual abstention from alcohol (to counteract excess drinking over the festive season – copyrighted by Alcohol Concern in 2014). It was also pretty dry in terms of new words. Though there was certainly no shortage of notable news items, they tended to… Read More

Are you ‘mabobing’? Read Lucy Mangan’s new article to find out.

I am mabobing as I type this, according to CorrinFoley – making random, fidgety movements (banging my foot against the chair, rapping my fingers on the keys between sentences). It’s because I have so many decisions to make in this column, the first of course being whether to… Read More

Are you ‘kwl’ or ‘cool’? Lucy Mangan looks at your word submissions from the last fortnight

News reaches me – via contributor kaiwaiipanda – that if you are under a certain age, you do not write “cool” in your texts. It is apparently only cool to write “kwl”. I m old, fthr tm. It is possible that they have sound reasons for this otherwise inexcusable… Read More

What happens at a Scrabble Tournament?

Mark Nyman, author of Scrabble Secrets, heads to Dunmurry to take on the Northern Ireland Scrabble Championship and gives us a snapshot of what it’s like to play tournament Scrabble. After quite an eventful journey to get to Ireland (one missed flight included), I just made it to the… Read More