Words – Page 5 – Interesting Literature

10 Weird Literary Phobias and Manias for Book-Lovers

Unusual words about literature every book-lover needs to know

Previously we’ve considered some essential words book-lovers should know; one of the book-words we coined, bibliosmia, has even found its way into other corners of the internet, albeit in a small way. (See also this Amazon discussion about the word and the phenomenon it describes; it also appears to have become a semi-popular hashtag on picture-sharing sites.) Since we came up with ‘bibliosmia’, anyway, we’ve uncovered lots of other weird and wonderful words relating to writing, reading, and other book-related activities and experiences. Here are ten of our favourites.

Alogotransiphobia denotes the fear of being caught on public transport with nothing to read.

15 Great Words Coined by Famous Authors

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 of the most descriptive and delicious words in the English language owe their existence to famous authors, whether it’s James Joyce or Lewis Carroll, John Milton or Dr Seuss.

15 Great New Words for Phenomena That Don’t Yet Have a Name

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 to get bibliosmia into common currency, but it needs a bit more of a push.) Using the hashtag #CoinANewWord, we encouraged our followers and other Twitterers to suggest new words for familiar experiences and feelings, especially those that are peculiar to the modern-day world. Below are some of our favourites. We’ll start with the winner of the competition, who received a stack of great non-fiction books on language and related subjects by Caroline Taggart (whose latest book, on a related theme, we’ve written about here), provided by the publishers, Michael O’Mara Books.

10 Interesting Facts about Modern Words

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 examines their histories, revealing how they are often reworkings of older words which originally had different meanings. (This is something we particularly enjoy, as exemplified by our previous facts about modern words that originated in literature, which casts an appraising eye over such ‘recent’ formations as ‘selfie’ and ‘twerk’.) So Taggart’s book, which is out next week, is on a subject close to our hearts, and had a fair bit to teach us about word origins. Here are our ten favourite things which we learnt from New Words for Old.

The Interesting Literary Origins of ‘Selfie’, ‘Unfriended’, ‘Twerk’, and Other Modern Words

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’ (actually found in print in the sixteenth century – with a different meaning, obviously!), ‘Google’ (found in 1907), ‘muggle’ (the thirteenth century), and others. Now, we’re looking at other modern words that aren’t so modern – even if they once had very different meanings from the ones we now associate with them.