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

26th Feb 2016

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

8 Winning Scrabble Words – Allan Simmons

18th Feb 2016

When you play Scrabble™ certain words can take on significant meanings, here Scrabble Champion Allan Simmons picks the words that he has played, which have also played a part in his life. 1.REIGNED When I first started to compile anagrams I was surprised to find that this simple… Read More

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

12th Feb 2016

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.

12th Feb 2016

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… Read More

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

12th Feb 2016

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?

11th Feb 2016

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… Read More

Tips for learning Scrabble words

29th Jan 2016

Allan Simmons, a former Scrabble champion and author of the forthcoming book Scrabble Trainer, shares his tips on how to learn words to improve your Scrabble game. There are nearly 120,000 two to eight letter words in the Collins Scrabble word list and very… Read More

‘Drynuary’ is nearly over, so what’s next on the word list? Here’s Lucy Mangan with your update…

29th Jan 2016

How are you? Have you survived Dry January? Or ‘Drynuary’, as submitted by Tommy, which if we’d thought of it earlier could have saved us all vital nanoseconds over the last four weeks. When you consider how boring all conversations about dry January are, a nanosecond saved on such discussion… Read More

New Year Etymology Corner – we take a look at the word of the moment, ‘resolution’

8th Jan 2016

‘Resolution’ is one of a group of nouns that come from the Latin word solūtus (meaning ‘made loose’) and are all related to verbs ending in ‘-solve’ (from the Latin solvō, meaning ‘I release’). Other members of this group are ‘dissolution/dissolve’ and ‘absolution/absolve’. They all suggest some sort of release… Read More