50 Fun Facts About Wordplay

Oprah Winfrey's studio takes its name from 'Oprah' spelled backwards, matching which Marx brother's stage name?

Harpo is 'Oprah' in reverse, and it was also the name of her on-screen husband in The Color Purple, the 1985 film that launched her acting career.

The joke spelling 'ghoti' borrows sounds from 'enough', 'women' and 'nation' to spell which everyday word?

Fish is the reading: 'gh' as in enough, 'o' as in women, 'ti' as in nation. The gag is often credited to George Bernard Shaw, yet it appears nowhere in his writings.

Which comedy duo made famous 'Who's on First?', a routine about baseball players with names like Who and What?

Abbott and Costello built the sketch on one misunderstanding that never clears up. In 1999 Time named it the best comedy sketch of the 20th century.

Which sweet course of a meal is spelled by reading the word 'stressed' backwards?

Desserts and 'stressed' mirror each other letter for letter. Word fans call such a pair an anadrome or, as a joke, an emordnilap, which is 'palindrome' in reverse.

Which author had Humpty Dumpty describe blended words as a 'portmanteau', with two meanings packed into one?

Lewis Carroll borrowed the name of a two-part travelling case for the idea in Through the Looking-Glass. Blends such as 'brunch' and 'motel' have been called portmanteaus ever since.

A word like 'masculine', which carries its own synonym 'male' inside it, is named after which animal?

Kangaroo words carry a smaller 'joey' word the way the animal carries its young in a pouch. 'Chocolate' carries 'cocoa', and 'inflammable' carries 'flammable'.

Lynne Truss's punctuation bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves takes its title from a joke about which animal?

A panda in the joke fires a gun in a café and walks out, because a badly punctuated wildlife guide says it 'eats, shoots and leaves'. One comma turns a diet into a crime.

In the classic English tongue twister first printed in 1813, Peter Piper picked a peck of what?

Pickled peppers fill the peck in a rhyme from John Harris's pronunciation primer, a book that offered a tongue twister for every letter of the alphabet.

The palindrome that begins 'A man, a plan, a canal' ends by naming which Central American country?

Panama completes the line, which reads the same in both directions once spaces and punctuation are ignored, just like 'madam' or 'racecar'.

Which board game did architect Alfred Butts invent in the 1930s under the early names Lexiko and Criss-Crosswords?

Scrabble got its tile counts and point values from Butts tallying how often each letter turned up in newspapers and other print.

Spoonerisms, slips that swap the opening sounds of two words, are named after a don at which English university?

Oxford's William Archibald Spooner, warden of New College, was said to scramble his words this way. Most of the famous slips pinned on him are apocryphal.

Which fill-in-the-blank word game, created by Leonard Stern and Roger Price, asks players for nouns and adjectives?

Mad Libs went unnamed for five years, until its creators overheard an actor in a restaurant say he wanted to ad-lib an interview.

Which playground code moves a word's first consonants to the end and adds 'ay', turning 'banana' into 'ananabay'?

Pig Latin is used mostly by children to confuse adults who have not cracked it. Early uses of the name described a jokey mock Latin instead.

In Cockney rhyming slang, the phrase 'apples and pears' stands for which part of a house?

Stairs rhymes with 'pears', and speakers often drop the rhyming half, so a Londoner going to bed might say they are heading 'up the apples'.

In which Shakespeare tragedy does the dying Mercutio pun on a word meaning both serious and a burial place?

Romeo and Juliet turns on the joke: 'grave' means both serious and buried, and Mercutio's death sends Romeo after Tybalt and into banishment.

The Importance of Being Earnest has a title that puns on a man's name; which playwright wrote the comedy?

Oscar Wilde paired the name Ernest with 'earnest', meaning serious, a pun that troubles translators. French productions most often swap in the name Constant to keep the joke.

Which character in Peggy Parish's children's books takes every figure of speech literally, with comic results?

Amelia Bedelia is a maid who misreads her orders so reliably that her employers learn to write requests like 'un-dust the furniture' to keep her on track.

Which Swedish pop group took its name from the first letters of its members' first names?

ABBA stands for Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid, and the name reads the same in both directions. Manager Stig Anderson started using it in 1973, tired of unwieldy names.

The word 'smog', applied to London's foul air in the 1900s, is a blend of 'fog' and which other word?

Smoke and fog merged into a name for the dirty haze of big cities. The coinage is usually credited to Henry Antoine Des Voeux in 1905, though the word was in print by 1880.

The nickname 'Bollywood' blends Hollywood with Bombay, the older name of which Indian city?

Mumbai's Hindi film industry kept the city's older name in its nickname, and the pattern spread: Lahore's film business became known as Lollywood.

Which character in The Simpsons keeps falling for Bart's prank calls asking for customers with pun names?

Moe Szyslak shouts each gag name across his tavern before the penny drops. Matt Groening based him on Louis 'Red' Deutsch, a real man made famous by repeated prank calls.

In Homer's Odyssey, which false name does Odysseus give the Cyclops Polyphemus before blinding him?

Nobody is the alias, so when the blinded giant shouts that Nobody has hurt him, his neighbours decide the gods are to blame and tell him to pray.

The words 'chortle' and 'galumphing' entered English from which nonsense poem about the killing of a monster?

Jabberwocky built 'chortle' by blending chuckle and snort, in a poem whose invented words still sound as if they ought to mean something.

Which children's novel by Norton Juster sends a bored boy named Milo to the pun-filled city of Dictionopolis?

The Phantom Tollbooth takes idioms at their word: Milo's quest, with a dog named Tock at his side, is to rescue two exiled princesses called Rhyme and Reason.

Which Hall of Fame Yankees catcher became as famous for his accidental, paradoxical sayings as for his baseball?

Yogi Berra's off-the-cuff remarks and malapropisms were so quotable that they earned their own name, Yogi-isms, and Barack Obama borrowed one when honouring him.

What is the name for a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet, like the one about a quick brown fox?

A pangram packs in all 26 letters. The fox-and-lazy-dog line was a handwriting practice sentence by 1885 and later became a standard test for typewriters and typefaces.

Which term describes words such as 'to', 'too' and 'two', which sound the same but differ in spelling and meaning?

Homophones are a favourite tool for puns and for misleading clues in puzzles. When the spellings differ, as with 'rain', 'reign' and 'rein', linguists also call them heterographs.

Which term for a self-contradicting phrase like 'cruel kindness' comes from Greek words meaning 'sharp' and 'dull'?

An oxymoron is literally 'sharp-dull', so the word is an example of itself. J. R. R. Tolkien read his own surname as a Germanic equivalent, 'dull-keen'.

The 2006 documentary Wordplay follows which crossword editor and the Stamford tournament he founded in 1978?

Will Shortz credits the film with swelling the next year's tournament by about 200 contestants, enough to force a move to a bigger venue.

Arthur Wynne's 1913 'Word-Cross', regarded as the first modern crossword, ran in a Sunday newspaper in which city?

New York was where the Liverpool-born Wynne built puzzles for the 'Fun' section of the Sunday World, adapting an older form called the word diamond.

Malapropisms are named after Mrs. Malaprop, a word-mangling character created by which 18th-century playwright?

Richard Sheridan named her after the French 'mal à propos', meaning poorly placed, and let her mangle the language all through his 1775 comedy The Rivals.

Wellerisms, jokes that twist a proverb, are named after Sam Weller, a servant created by which Victorian novelist?

Charles Dickens saw monthly sales of The Pickwick Papers soar to about 40,000 copies once readers met the wisecracking Sam Weller.

The bumbling constable Dogberry, whose muddled words gave English 'Dogberryism', appears in which Shakespeare comedy?

Much Ado About Nothing lets Dogberry's night watch stumble on the villains' plot by accident, even as he mangles every long word he reaches for.

Which subatomic particle got its name when physicist Murray Gell-Mann found the word in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake?

Quark turns up in a line about a bird chorus mocking King Mark. Gell-Mann had the sound in mind already and settled on Joyce's spelling when he came across it.

'Weird Al' Yankovic recorded a song made entirely of palindromes as a parody of which folk-rock songwriter's style?

Bob Dylan's cryptic delivery suited lines that read the same in both directions, and even the title, 'Bob', is a palindrome. Yankovic wrote it in 2002, a palindromic year.

The five-word palindrome known as the Sator Square has its earliest known example in the ruins of which Roman city?

Pompeii's copy dates from before the earthquake of AD 62, a find that led many scholars to see the square as a Roman word puzzle that Christians adopted later.

The 19-letter palindrome 'saippuakivikauppias', meaning a soapstone seller, is a word in which language?

Finnish builds long compounds, and this one is the longest single-word palindrome in everyday use. English peaks with the 12-letter 'tattarrattat', which James Joyce used in Ulysses.

Which animal's name can be repeated eight times to make a grammatical English sentence?

Buffalo works because the word is at once a city, an animal and a verb meaning to bully, so the sentence says that bison from the city bully other bison there.

Writer Sylvia Wright coined which word for a misheard lyric after mishearing a Scottish ballad as a child?

Mondegreen comes from her own mistake: she heard the ballad's words about a slain earl being laid on the green as the death of a 'Lady Mondegreen'.

The name Wordle is a pun on the surname of Josh Wardle, a software engineer from which country?

Wales is where Wardle comes from. He built the game as a personal project for himself and his partner before releasing it to the public in 2021.

Which kind of pun, linking a quoted line to an apt adverb, takes its name from a boy inventor in adventure novels?

A Tom Swifty parodies the Tom Swift books, which strained to avoid a plain 'said'. The original joke simply had Tom urging haste 'swiftly'.

What is the term for writing that deliberately avoids one letter, as the 1939 novel Gadsby does for 50,000 words?

A lipogram leaves a letter out on purpose. Gadsby dropped the commonest one in English, so it describes a horse-drawn fire engine without the words horse, fire or engine.

Georges Perec, author of a whole novel missing one common vowel, belonged to which French writers' group?

Oulipo treats strict rules as a spur to invention. Its co-founder Raymond Queneau described members as rats who build the labyrinth they plan to escape from.

Words like 'cleave' and 'dust', which can mean their own opposites, are named after which Roman god?

Janus words face both ways, like the god of doorways and beginnings: to dust a shelf takes the dust off, while to dust a cake puts sugar on.

Linguists in 2003 coined which term for a plausible mishearing, such as 'old-timers' disease' for Alzheimer's?

Eggcorn was itself one of these slips: Geoffrey Pullum proposed the label after a woman was reported to have used 'egg corn' when she meant acorn.

What blended word describes an acronym expansion invented after the fact, such as reading SOS as 'Save Our Souls'?

Backronym blends 'back' and 'acronym'. SOS was never short for anything: it was chosen because three dots, three dashes and three dots are unmistakable in Morse code.

Which French-derived phrase names a remark with a second, usually risqué meaning, though modern French never uses it?

Double entendre comes from an obsolete French expression that has not been used in France for centuries. John Dryden gave it its suggestive English sense in 1673.

The recursive acronym GNU, a programmer's joke that contains itself, stands for 'GNU's Not' what?

Unix is the system GNU set out to imitate without copying: the project is designed to work like it but is free software containing none of its code.

The O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships, an annual contest for punsters, is held each May in which Texas city?

Austin stages it at the O. Henry Museum, where entrants in the Punniest of Show contest deliver 90-second monologues stuffed with puns.

Douglas Hofstadter coined which word for lettering that can still be read when it is turned upside down?

An ambigram squeezes two readings into one design. Dan Brown built the plot of Angels & Demons around John Langdon's examples and named his hero Robert Langdon after the artist.