40 English words that don’t seem to be in perfect orderWhy isn’t
phonetic spelled the way it sounds?
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How come the word
abbreviation is so long?
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Wouldn’t the opposite of
abbreviate be
breviate?
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What’s another word for
thesaurus?
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Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to call a
dictionary a
definitionary?
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Would anyone ever look up the word
dictionary in the
dictionary?
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Is there something
spellbinding about
dictionaries?
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Why is it that
definitions are seldom
definitive?
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How come there is
no verb form of the word
verb?
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Since
pronoun is a
noun, why isn’t
proverb a
verb?
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Can you recite a list of
nouns verbatim?
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Do
verbose people ever use
nouns?
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Would
“buy” and
“try” be good
adverbs?
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Does this sentence need
reverberation?
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Doesn’t the word
syntax sound rather more
political than
scholarly?
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How come there is no
anagram for
anagram?
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Why doesn’t the word
umlaut have one?
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Wouldn’t
analogy be a good synonym for
proctology?
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Why didn’t they call a
palindrome something like a
palinilap or
emordrome?
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Does
onomatopoeia sound anything like it means?
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Wouldn’t you say most
novels are not?
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What’s the word for when you can’t think of the word?
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Why isn’t
lisp pronounced
lithp?
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Why is
number abbreviated as
“no” when there is no
“o”?
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Why is
phraseology only one word?
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Shouldn’t there be a shorter word for
monosyllabic?
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What is the
opposite of
opposite?
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Who
coined the phrase
“coined the phrase”?
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Why isn’t
acronym an
acronym of something?
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Isn’t
dyslexic really spelled
cixelsyd?
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Is
slang short for
“sloppy language”?
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Why do they call the thing at the end of sentence a
period instead of a
dot?
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Can you
subtract something from a
summary?
—From James Wegryn’s “A Barrelful of Words”
