WordFixx

 Some very strange words came up in a session of Word Connect this weekend.  The letters brought up an old word from deep in my brain: KNURL.  If ever there was a word that sounded like an ancient Anglo-Saxon remnant, that would be it.  Hopping over to some dictionaries, I was surprised by how many variants there are, and then remembered that it is more well known with a G instead of a K, as in GNARLY. So, a KNURL is the same as a KNUR, which probably came from KNAR, and they all refer to the bumps on the trunk of a tree.  Not that any usage could be considered "modern", it also means that a smooth material has been specifically modified so we can get a better grip on it, so things like darts are KNURLED, or have been through the process of KNURLING.  As a verb, somewhere there is a machine or craftsman who can KNURL things. [EO] suggests it is probably derived from Middle English KNOR(-) meaning "knot", from about 1400 AD. Over on the G side, we have GNARL...

Here is a brief list of distinct currencies of Africa.  Note that Africa is historically complicated, being subjected to centuries of foreign imperialism.  CENTIMES and FRANCS were/are used in many African nations which were once French colonies.  LIRA in Italian areas, ESCUDOS in Portuguese areas, PESOS in Spanish areas.  And variations of DINARS closer to the Arab states. ANGOLAR- plural ANGOLARES- (Angola, 100 cents or 20 macutas) ARIARY- (Madagascar, 5 francs/iraimbilanja) BIRR (Ethiopia, 100 santim) BUTUT (Gambia) CAURI (Guinea) CEDI (Ghana, 100 pesewas) DALASI (Gambia, 4 shillings or 100 bututs) EKUELE var EKWELE- (Equatorial Guinea) IRAIMBILANJA (Madagascar), really, a search said it is valid in the Scrabble US/Canada dictionaries. KHOUM (Mauritania) KOBO (Nigeria) KWACHA (Malawi, 100 tambala; Zambia, 100 ngwee) KWANZA (Angola) LEONE (Sierra Leone, 100 cents) LILANGENI plural EMALANGENI (Swaziland, 100 cents) LOTI plural MALOTI (Lesotho, 100 lesente) MACUTA- (...

In a word unscrambler app last night, we ran into a set of letters where we had a strange mental block and could not see the obvious answer.  The letters were REMUPI, which is pretty funny to say.  Sometimes we just try goofy words because they are amusing.  Then we saw U-PRIME.  Still not a word, but PRIME is a good sub-puzzle.  PRIME, PRIM, PIE, PIER, RIM, RIME, RIP, REP ... it's good to do these in groups, then pick the next group to run through.  There's not much that could be done with the U though, certainly nothing came to mind about adding a U to PRIME in any sensible way.  EMU, RUMP, but it was still a dead end. After staring at it and shuffling letters and still not seeing anything, it turned out to be UMPIRE.  What's funny is how neither of us give a hoot about sports.  Maybe if we were big baseball fans we would have seen UMPIRE right away?  Oddly, the same app rejected UMP. Also, IMPURE, which was elusive because we're used ...

Following in the series of world monetary units, here is a word set for currency in Asia. Again, these vary widely through the decades in spelling and relations to other units, but there should be some basic usefulness for building vocabulary. AFGHANI (Afghanistan, 100 puls) ANNA (India, 12 pies) ATT (Laos) AVO (Macau) BAHT (Thailand, 100 satangs) CHHERTUM or CHETRUM (Bhutan) DIRAM (Tajikistan) DONG (Vietnam, 100 xu) HWAN (Korea, 100 won, 100 JIAO) JIAO (Korea) KIP (Laos, 100 atts) KOPECK or KOPEK (Russia, see ruble) KYAT (Myanmar, 100 pyas) LAARI (Maldives) MOHAR- (Nepal, until 1932, 128 dams) MONGO (Mongolia) NGULTRUM (Bhutan, 100 chhertum) PAISA plural PAISE, a.k.a. PICE plural PICE (India) PATACA (Macau, 100 avos) PIASTER or PIASTRE (French Indochina, 100 cent) PUL (Afghanistan) PYA (Myanmar) RENMINBI (China, a term for Chinese money in general, not a specific denomination) RIEL (Cambodia) RUBLE (Tajikistan, 100 tanga) RUFIYAA (Maldives, 100 laari) RUPEE (India, 100 paisa) and many...

Almost every country in the world has its own currency, both a small unit (penny) and large unit (dollar), so with close to 200 nations and a whole history, there are tons of words here to add to a vocabulary.  Most people have likely heard of the most common units, like Japanese YEN, Mexican PESO, British POUND, and the EURO which replaced most European currencies around the year 2000.  Here are some others to look for in your word challenges.  The exact conversions and even the spellings vary across the decades.  All of these are in the Scrabble dictionary unless marked with a (-) and all have a plural which adds an "s" unless the plural is specifically given. Here are the currencies used in Europe in the last century or so. AUKSINAS- (Lithuania) BAN plural BANI (Romania) CENTAS or CENTAI or CENTU (Lithuania) CENTESIMO plural CENTESIMI (Italy) CENTIMOS (Spain & others) DRACHMA plural DRACHMAE or DRACHMAS (Greece, 100 lepta) DRAM (Armenia, 100 LUMA) ESCUDO (Port...

In this series on alphabets, this is where it gets interesting.  The Cyrillic alphabet is used by Russian, many Slavic languages, and dozens of languages across central Asia, BUT the Scrabble dictionary just ignores it entirely.  Somehow, none of these letters count as English words.  I am puzzled at who draws up these rules and boundaries.  Languages are amazing artifacts of human ingenuity and culture, and alphabets are the iconography of those ideals. I will list a few of the letters here.  Some have the same names as English or Greek letters already mentioned.  You can get a good overview on Wikipedia .  But of the documents I found, I think the Unicode specification for these letters is the most modern and comprehensive.  It's a PDF file , but well worth checking out the letters on page one and all the names on the remaining pages.  If that's not enough, the Wikipedia article links to six more Unicode extensions bringing even more langua...

My estimate of the next most commonly talked-about alphabet would be the Hebrew Alphabet.  Another long, fascinating history, but with even more versions of the spellings.  Feel free to explore this topic .  Here, I will put a + next to the variants that are in the Scrabble dictionary, as of tonight's search, and * again means it collides with other English words or meanings and gets lost in the noise. ALEF or ALEPH+ (ALEPH is how I always saw it in the mathematics of infinity) BET* or BETH+ GIMEL+ DALET or DALETH+ HE* VAV+ ZAYIN+ HET* TET or TETH+ YOD+ or YODH+ KAF+ or KAPH+ LAMED* MEM+ NUN* SAMEKH+ AYIN+ PE+ SADHE+ or TSADE+ or TSADI+ QOF or QOPH+ RESH+ SHIN* TAV+ I am not sure what the plurals of all these would be.  But QOPH is a favorite Scrabble word for being a rare case of a Q not followed by a U.

The next logical group of "fun words" would be the Greek alphabet, though it is a odd stretch of logic where the names of letters from one language somehow qualify as words in another language ... but if we do have to talk about them, then they are part of a language.  Every letter of every alphabet is part of every languages in case somebody someday needs to mention them?  Anyway, the Greek Alphabet: ALPHA* BETA* GAMMA* DELTA* EPSILON ZETA ETA THETA IOTA* KAPPA LAMBDA MU NU XI OMICRON PI RHO SIGMA* TAU UPSILON PHI CHI* PSI* OMEGA* Again, I marked words with asterisks which have other common usages.  ALPHA being the first of a set or the top dog in a social group, ALPHA and BETA are phases of software testing, DELTA is a variance, SIGMA in how significant a scientific result is, PI is universally known from geometry, you can have an IOTA (small amount) of something, and OMEGA is the last of a series.  It is hard to separate the mathematical use of the symbols from th...

If you are a player of words games, you are probably full of curiosity and always looking for new words you can play or find.  The "Word Source" series will take one source of words you may not have thought of before, and give a lot to think about. I can't promise that all of these are in any one specific dictionary, and various games use their own dictionaries or shared online dictionaries.  You can search the Scrabble dictionary here . For this first installment, here are the names of the letters of the alphabet in English.  In these lists, the ones marked with a star have collided with other words, so these won't be additions to a vocabulary, and I confirmed that the ones marked with a + are in the Scrabble dictionary right now. A (some sources have AY as a variant but that is more commonly a variant of AYE). BEE* CEE+ DEE+ E (some sources have EE) EF+ or EFF GEE* AITCH+ or HAITCH I JAY* KAY+ EL* or ELL* EM+ EN+ O PEE* CUE* AR+ ESS+ TEE+* U VEE+ DOUBLE-U EX+* WY+ Z...

I know some years have passed, but my enjoyment of words never fades.  I just could not continue writing word history articles with any significant authority, and did not want to spread false etymologies, since the internet is already full of bad information.  So, I ended up doing some blurbs about the curiosity of words.  And then some bad times hit and there wasn't much to say for a while. But now, as several other blogs of mine converge on different aspects of gaming, it seemed fitting to reuse the Word Fixx blog as a place to discuss words and combinations of word in the context of word games, whether you are looking for new Scrabble words or playing one of many online word games, unscrambling or hunting for new combinations.  So, some themed vocabulary builders and pattern finding ideas might be of some interest...