A collection of great coinages from famous writers, from ‘blatant’ to ‘nerd’ We put together the following picture a few weeks ago and shared it on our Twitter feed, where it proved popular enough for us to repost it here. It’s designed to be a colourful illustration of how many […]
15 neologisms and coinages to describe as yet unnamed experiences in the modern world Here at Interesting Literature Towers we love interesting word facts. On Twitter we recently held a competition to coin a new word for something that doesn’t really have an existing word to describe it. (We’ve tried […]
Ten surprising stories and histories surrounding the language of the modern world This week we’ve been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, a review copy of Caroline Taggart’s book New Words for Old: Recycling Our Language for the Modern World. The book takes a look at supposedly ‘modern’ or contemporary words and […]
The origins of 10 popular given names in the writings of famous authors Literature has given us many – well, many given names. Popular first names have been created specially for novels or plays, and have become established as names for thousands if not millions of people born ever since. Here […]
The true origins of some modern additions to the Oxford English Dictionary and other ‘new’ words This post is a sort of sequel to our earlier post, about 10 seemingly modern words which actually have older, literary connections. In that post, we cast an eye over words such as ’email’ […]