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Product Description
Product Description
In this delightful encore to the national bestseller A Word A Day, Anu Garg, the founder of the wildly popular A Word A Day Web site (wordsmith.org), presents an all–new collection of unusual, intriguing words and real–life anecdotes that will thrill writers, scholars, and word buffs everywhere. Another Word A Day celebrates the English language in all its quirkiness, grandeur, and fun, and features new chapters ranging from "Words Formed Erroneously" and "Red–Herring Words" to "Kangaroo Words," "Discover the Theme," and "What Does That Company Name Mean?" In them, you′ll find a treasure trove of curious and compelling words, including agelast, dragoman, mittimus, nyctalopia, quacksalver, scission, tattersall, and zugzwang. Each entry includes a concise definition, etymology, and usage example, interspersed with illuminating quotations.
Praise for a word a day
"Anu Garg′s many readers await their A Word A Day rations hungrily. Now at last here′s a feast for them and other verbivores. Eat up!"
––Barbara Wallraff, Senior Editor at The Atlantic Monthly and author of Word Court
"AWADies will be familiar with Anu Garg′s refreshing approach to words: words are fun and they have fascinating histories."
––John Simpson, Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary
From the Back Cover
In this delightful encore to the national bestseller A Word A Day, Anu Garg, the founder of the wildly popular A Word A Day Web site (wordsmith.org), presents an all–new collection of unusual, intriguing words and real–life anecdotes that will thrill writers, scholars, and word buffs everywhere. Another Word A Day celebrates the English language in all its quirkiness, grandeur, and fun, and features new chapters ranging from "Words Formed Erroneously" and "Red–Herring Words" to "Kangaroo Words," "Discover the Theme," and "What Does That Company Name Mean?" In them, you′ll find a treasure trove of curious and compelling words, including agelast, dragoman, mittimus, nyctalopia, quacksalver, scission, tattersall, and zugzwang. Each entry includes a concise definition, etymology, and usage example, interspersed with illuminating quotations.
Praise for a word a day
"Anu Garg′s many readers await their A Word A Day rations hungrily. Now at last here′s a feast for them and other verbivores. Eat up!"
—Barbara Wallraff, Senior Editor at The Atlantic Monthly and author of Word Court
"AWADies will be familiar with Anu Garg′s refreshing approach to words: words are fun and they have fascinating histories."
—John Simpson, Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary
A reader wrote, I know you've been featuring words every day at Wordsmith.org for more than a decade. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Although the reader is likely to encounter some unfamiliar words in this collection (nyctalopia, dasypygal, and zugzwang, for example), all of the words are in use, and most are illustrated by examples from current sources.
_Another Word a Day_ is organized into 52 chapters, each with a theme (for a few chapters the reader is invited to discover the theme). Examples of chapters are "Words Formed Erroneously," "Words about Words," and "Numeric Terms." Each chapter includes five entry words, and each entry includes pronunciation, plural (if applicable), part of speech, definition, etymology, and use in context from a published source.
Nearly every chapter includes reader feedback, presumably collected from Garg's online community -- some 600,000 strong. For example, seventeen theories of the origin of the term "eighty-six" are presented, even though no one theory can be proven.
Several chapters offer puzzles or quizzes (answers are provided at the end of the book), and an index of entry words is helpful. Pithy quotations appear at the bottom of most pages -- a bit of lagniappe for the reader.
Sometimes a person with a fresh perspective can help us appreciate things around us that we take for granted. Such is the case with Anu Garg, who was born and raised in the state of Uttar Pradesh, in India, and did not begin to learn English until he was in the sixth grade. Garg's fascination with words and his mastery of English are apparent, however. With clarity and conciseness he leads us on mini-explorations of our language. The enthusiasm of this most worthy "tour guide" is contagious.
I received a copy of this book back in the winter and promptly lost it when it slid behind a rather ugsome desk I was in the process of tidying. Now that I have ousted the book, I am enjoying it. More to the point, I'm learning a great deal about a diverse, interesting collection of words. Mr. Garg succeeds in large measure by making the process entertaining. I suspect that the most ardent agelast would at least chuckle to himself at some point and that even erudite readers will run across words they had either forgotten about or hitherto not encountered.
Mr. Garg offers definitions parsed out by parts of speech, delves into a bit of etymology without lapsing into morbidly detailed fact-finding, and includes examples of how each word has been used in the current lexicon. He augments the text with an abundance of quotes and pithy sidebars.
In short, a book that provides nutriment in spades for those folks, myself included, who are interested in words and their usage and history.
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