If you stumble over your new mat in the passage, what science are you shown to have neglected? Pneumatics. Charades, hangman, anagrams, tongue-twisters, and new for this edition, games based on text messaging: dozens of fun and fiendish word games jostle for space in this updated edition of Tony Augarde's classic guide. From the highbrow riddle to the lowly pun, The Oxford Guide to Word Games provides a comprehensive history of verbal wit and wordplay. Organized thematically, the book examines twenty-six forms of word game in absorbing detail, including their history, and provides entertaining examples throughout. From Scrabble and Spoonerisms, Crosswords and Chronograms to Playing with Poetry, neither the crossword addict nor the student of linguistics and lexicography will be able to resist!
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The newly updated Oxford Guide to Word Games, now complete with a short section on the jolly joys of text messaging, is full of such delights and splendid inconsequential fun as the fact that "synthetic cream" is an anagram of Manchester City or that "Marge lets Norah see Sharon's telegram" is a perfect palindrome. Do you know (or no) your homonyms from your heteronyms, perhaps invalid or enjoyed by invalids? Or try this tongue twister: "She was a thistle sifter and sifted thistles through a thistle sieve"
Acrostics, chronograms, spoonerisms, charades and pangrams all jostle for space in this witty and entertaining book which manages to include a history of the crossword puzzle and of Scrabble alongside how to play lexical ping-pong or how to crack a rebus such as EGNC for Aegean Sea. What is the longest word used by Shakespeare? Honorificabilitudinitatibus in Love's Labour's Lost. A Latin ablative plural, it means literally "with honourableness"; Augarde observes that "the word is also interesting for its long regular succession of alternate consonants and vowels.
Oxford Guide to Word Games manages to be pretty scholarly although it wears its learning lightly. It gathers together a lot of historical and etymological information which you'd be hard put to find anywhere else in a single volume. Anyone who has a love affair with words and their quirks needs this. So do students of English language and, of course, it's essential reading for quiz compilers everywhere. --Susan Elkin
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First published in 1984, it quickly became a bestseller and is now reissued with new chapters. -- Sunday Times, June 1, 2003
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The RIDDLE is the oldest and most widespread type of word game. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The RIDDLE is the oldest and most widespread type of word game. Read the first page
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Nothing really new but a good read
18 Jan 2008
By Jessie
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I have other books that are similar to this one. So, nothing really new.
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