Jose Carillo's English Forum

General Category => Language Humor at its Finest => Topic started by: Joe Carillo on November 16, 2014, 11:46:48 AM

Title: English words that don’t seem to be in perfect order
Post by: Joe Carillo on November 16, 2014, 11:46:48 AM
40 English words that don’t seem to be in perfect order


Why 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” (http://www.jimwegryn.com/Words/Language.htm)