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A word search. A word search, word find, word seek, word sleuth or mystery word puzzle is a word game that consists of the letters of words placed in a grid, which usually has a rectangular or square shape. The objective of this puzzle is to find and mark all the words hidden inside the box. The words may be placed horizontally, vertically, or ...
The word later came to be used as a noun, first as an abstract noun meaning 'the state or condition of being puzzled', and later developing the meaning of 'a perplexing problem'. The OED ' s earliest clear citation in the sense of 'a toy that tests the player's ingenuity' is from Sir Walter Scott 's 1814 novel Waverley , referring to a toy ...
The meanings of these words do not always correspond to Germanic cognates, and occasionally the specific meaning in the list is unique to English. Those Germanic words listed below with a Frankish source mostly came into English through Anglo-Norman, and so despite ultimately deriving from Proto-Germanic, came to English through a Romance ...
A laconic phrase or laconism is a concise or terse statement, especially a blunt and elliptical rejoinder. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It is named after Laconia , the region of Greece including the city of Sparta , whose ancient inhabitants had a reputation for verbal austerity and were famous for their often pithy remarks.
Incunabula is commonly used in English to refer to the earliest stage or origin of something, and especially to copies of books that predate the spread of the printing press c. AD 1500. ab initio: from the beginning: i.e., "from the outset", referring to an inquiry or investigation. Ab initio mundi means "from the beginning of the world".
In common usage and linguistics, concision (also called conciseness, succinctness, [1] terseness, brevity, or laconicism) is a communication principle [2] of eliminating redundancy, [3] generally achieved by using as few words as possible in a sentence while preserving its meaning. More generally, it is achieved through the omission of parts ...
On December 21, 1913, Arthur Wynne, a journalist born in Liverpool, England, published a "word-cross" puzzle in the New York World that embodied most of the features of the modern genre. This puzzle is frequently cited as the first crossword puzzle, and Wynne as the inventor. An illustrator later reversed the "word-cross" name to "cross-word".
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. [1] Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym , with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite.