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

Gloving, Basic Income, and Lemmium: December’s Words in the News

8th Jan 2016

As we settle back into our routines with fresh faces and Christmas behind us, we’re bringing some great neologisms into 2016 that December gifted to our linguistic stockings. The adjective nonbinary isn’t exactly new, even when referring to gender (where it indicates a person who identifies as neither female nor… Read More

Lucy Mangan looks at your first word submissions of 2016

8th Jan 2016

Happy New Year to you all! I trust you all had a lovely break and are now enjoying unparalleled success with your chosen resolutions. I am not. But in a crazy twist no one saw coming, I have conceived another one which renders any guilt or fretting about this impossible. Read More