Words & word games

Where words come from, how dictionaries admit them, which usage rules matter, and letter games from anagrams to word ladders.

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  Anagrams, palindromes and pangrams: a field guide to word play

  What anagrams, palindromes, pangrams, isograms, lipograms and word ladders are, where the classic examples come from, how to check them by hand or in a few lines of JavaScript, and how to play with them on letter tiles.

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  Fewer or less, who or whom: usage rules worth keeping, and myths to drop

  Which English usage rules help readers (fewer and less, who and whom, the serial comma) and which are myths you can safely ignore (split infinitives, final prepositions, singular they), with what major dictionaries actually say.

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  How a word gets into the dictionary, and into a spell checker

  How Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary decide that a new word has arrived, what citations are, the famous ghost word dord, and why a perfectly good new word can still be underlined by your spell checker.