WordFixx

When swiping words, I usually tell Anne that "STY is for pigs and STYE is in your eye."  Of course, it's not as simple as that. Apparently, it is not incorrect to use STY for the pimple-like blemish on the eyelid. What's interesting is how many other conjugations there are, which I never thought of.  As for the pig STY , it can be used as a verb, so you can STY the animals, whistle while you are STYING them, and when you're done they have all been STIED.  And more than one are STIES. For the plural of the swelling, both STIES and STYES appear to be valid. The animal pen STY comes from Old English _stig_ with the same meaning, going back to at least the 12th century. The bump on the eyelid comes from Old English _stigend_ from _stigan_ (to rise or go up), which is a cousin to the word that became STAIR.  Oddly. "Sty." Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sty. Accessed 24 Dec 2024.

One common series of words that comes up in word games is ANT, ANTE, ANTI.   ANT is a small insect we're all familiar with. ANTE is a wager placed before cards are dealt.  It's an interesting word since it also appears as a verb with a helper word: ANTE UP.  Which leads to the expression "up the ANTE," meaning to raise the stakes.  As a verb, you can be ANTEING.  After placing that bet (or changing the stakes) you have ANTED (prounced "anteed").   As a Latin word, "ante" simply means before, and as such it occurs as a prefix in many words like antediluvian: "before the Flood". ANTI is an odd one.  It's just the common prefix ANTI-, meaning "opposite of", used on its own, like taking an ANTACID to fight acid in your throat.  You can be ANTI crime, which is slightly different than an anti-crime bill.  A fun example from MW is "she is ANTI anything fun," meaning opposed to anything fun.  These all just seem so clunky....

Sometimes when rushing through a puzzle app, swiping words so quickly, the actual words can become a blur.  I am used to telling Anne about alternate American/English versions of words, like COLOR (Am) vs COLOUR (Eng) and NITER (Am) vs NITRE (Eng).  So I got into a blur where I ended up thinking BYRE and BIER were the same word, just different dialect spellings. But no, a BYRE is a shed for a cow, and a BIER is a typically wooden platform for carrying the dead.  So, if you have cattle, you can get them into the BYRE, but if you have a corpse or coffin to carry to a gravesite, a BIER would be the thing. In German, BIER is just BEER. And while swiping those letters, I misspelled BIER as BRIE, which is a soft spreadable cheese, like cream cheese.  I can't remember the last time I actually had some, but I seem to recall it looked like cream cheese but tasted skunky and awful.

It's easy to overlook algae, the single-celled plants that are at the bottom of most food chains.  When we do see them at all, they are often just green slime on the rocks in a stream.  But there are tens of thousands of varieties including some of the largest seaweed on Earth. The word is Latin and would be expected to have all the usual endings.  So ALGE or ALGA is a single one of these cells, ALGAE is the whole colony, and all these things are ALGAL life forms.  There is technically a plural ALGAS as well, but it sounds like a more modern "let's not use Latin" variation from folks who don't like -AE endings.  Like the modern "octopuses" for people who forget it was "octopi" when we were growing up. Chemicals to kill ALGAE are ALGICIDES, they are ALGICIDAL.  Things are like algae but are not technically algae are called ALGOID.  And a viscous substance that can be extracted from brown algae is ALGIN -- it is used as a thickener in foods and p...

ULNA is one of the bones in your arm.  It's the thinner and longer bone opposite the thumb.  When talking about it clinically, ULNAR means "of or around the Ulna".  And more than one are ULNAE.  Those are all classic Latin word endings. A quick shift of letters gives LUNA (the Moon), and if you're talking about the Moon, those things are LUNAR features.  The superstitious link between the full moon and strange human behavior leads to LUNACY (behavior caused by the Moon) and being a downright LUNATIC (a person supposedly stricken by LUNAR impulses).  A full cycle of the moon (a month) is a LUNATION. I thought that LUNE word be another word for lunation (month), but it's actually from geometry: a specific curve between two circular arcs, as one circle has a greater diameter than the other the result is shaped like a crescent Moon.  A Moon-shaped object is LUNATE, including a specific bone in your wrist. Note that Luna is a Latin name for our Moon, so it ...

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in high school more than 40 years ago, and always admired the way D&D could pull in material from all know mythologies and tap into the history of high fantasy literature, from the Lord of the Rings to the old Conan novels. While I don't expect every phrase from this rich (but strange) heritage to show up in every dictionary, one huge pet peeve of mine is that the word GEAS is not in the Scrabble dictionary or any dictionary used by any online games I play.  Heck, you can always find ROCS and LICHES and ghosts and goblins in modern games.  But never GEAS. GEAS comes from the Irish, through Scottish to English.  A GEAS is an unwilling quest, which can also be conveyed as a taboo, or the curse that will be bestowed upon you for breaking a taboo.  If you take on a quest of your own free will, that's one thing.  But if a demigod gives you a GEAS to walk to the ends of the earth, you're in for a world of pain. Wikipedia has ...