Words: Introduction

I’ve always loved words: unusual words, technical words, words with interesting etymologies, words that are often misused.

For a while at the end of the last millennium, I wrote little filler items about words for the British Medical Journal, under the slightly self-congratulatory title Words to the Wise. Some have survived to become accessible on the internet, albeit mostly behind a paywall on the BMJ website:

Turning the worm

Byzantine connections

An extended family

Poison arrows

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

Words that count (free full content)

The white album

Muscling in (free full content)

I also used to write occasional Word of the Day items for the site yourDictionary.com, almost all of which have now disappeared. There seems to be a solitary example remaining, oddly preserved on a completely different website. Not even my best one …

So, the set of posts Categorized as “Words” is my chance to get back into that sort of thing. And this time, since I’m setting the rules, I may make occasional diversions to talk about letters, phrases or quotations, too.

I’m planning to include phonetic pronunciations, which will involve a little preliminary fiddling around with web fonts. I apologize in advance if you find yourself peering at some little white boxes or question marks where there should be IPA characters.