Is That a Word?: From AA to ZZZ, the Weird and Wonderful Language of Scrabble

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Acrostics are used to add new dimension to a poem or other text. They can transform straightforward poetry or prose into a word puzzle by enlisting the reader to decode a secret message. In addition, acrostics are often used to spell out names or meanings that are associated with the text but that have not been said outright—this can be used for comedic effect, to tell a secret, or to give supplemental information. Acrostics can also make poems easier to remember or memorize, as their messages can function as mnemonic devices that help a reader to recall the remainder of each line. For this reason, acrostics are commonly used in children's poetry. Other Helpful Acrostic Resources Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of "Minimal Free Forms" in 1928. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves. [9] :11 This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes (units of meaning). However, some written words are not minimal free forms as they make no sense by themselves (for example, the and of). [10] :77 Some semanticists have put forward a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, indefinable words representing fundamental concepts that are intuitively meaningful. According to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations. [11] [12] Features Positive words starting with the letter A include: abounding, accommodating, active, agile, amiable, articulate, authentic, aware, awe-inspiring, and amazing. These are words that describe someone having pleasant characteristics or behaviors. Commonly referred to as "Chaucer's ABC's," this poem is an example of the sub-genre of acrostic known as abecedarian poetry, in which the first letters of each stanza spell the alphabet in sequence. In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax, words (also called lexical items in the literature) are construed as "bundles" of linguistic features that are united into a structure with form and meaning. [13] :36–37 For example, the word "koalas" has semantic features (it denotes real-world objects, koalas), category features (it is a noun), number features (it is plural and must agree with verbs, pronouns, and demonstratives in its domain), phonological features (it is pronounced a certain way), etc.

Phonetic boundaries: Some languages have particular rules of pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be. For example, in a language that regularly stresses the last syllable of a word, a word boundary is likely to fall after each stressed syllable. Another example can be seen in a language that has vowel harmony (like Turkish): [15] :9 the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. Nevertheless, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions. The above list is not comprehensive. There are literally hundreds of ways the Random Word Generator can The current classification of words into classes is based on the work of Dionysius Thrax, who, in the 1st century BC, distinguished eight categories of Ancient Greek words: noun, verb, participle, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb, and conjunction. Later Latin authors, Apollonius Dyscolus and Priscian, applied his framework to their own language; since Latin has no articles, they replaced this class with interjection. Adjectives ('happy'), quantifiers ('few'), and numerals ('eleven') were not made separate in those classifications due to their morphological similarity to nouns in Latin and Ancient Greek. They were recognized as distinct categories only when scholars started studying later European languages. [3] :13:629 The application is available for various devices, including tablets and smartphones. Microsoft has worked on accessibility features, such as the immersive reader, which benefit users with visual or learning disabilities. And while there are alternatives in the market such as Google Docs or LibreOffice Writer, Microsoft Word remains the leader in terms of functionality, integration, and support. You and a digital sheet of paper: that's Word In addition to these named forms, acrostics can be non-standard. For example, some acrostics spell out words using neither the first nor last letters of a line, but rather by emphasizing letters in different places.

Name Inspiration

This poem by William Blake puts a special emphasis on the sounds of London's cityscape, such as the cries of the chimneysweeps and the sighs of the soldiers. In the third stanza, the initial letters of each line form an acrostic that spells the word "HEAR," which underscores the speaker's fixation on the sounds in his environment. This is an example of acrostic being used in just one stanza of a poem—the remainder of the poem does not contain acrostics. generated. In this way, writers can challenge their creativity to push their writing skills. Spelling and Vocabulary

a b An introduction to language and linguistics. Ralph W. Fasold, Jeff Connor-Linton. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-521-84768-1. OCLC 62532880. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: others ( link) Abecedarian: An acrostic that, instead of spelling a word, spells the alphabet. Chaucer's poem "La Priere de Nostre Dame" is an example of an abecedarian acrostic. This type of acrostic may also be referred to as an abecedarius. Linguistics: an introduction to language and communication. Adrian Akmajian (6thed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2010. ISBN 978-0-262-01375-8. OCLC 424454992. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: others ( link) Once you have input all of your specifications, all you have to do is to press the Generate Random Words button, and a list of random words will appear. Below are some of the common ways people use this tool. Games Some words that start with “a” that are appropriate for a kindergarten audience include apple, airplane, art, astronaut, ant, adventure, and animal.Katamba, Francis (2005). English words: structure, history, usage (2nded.). London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-29892-X. OCLC 54001244. The earliest examples of acrostics can be found in the Hebrew Bible. Several passages in the book of Psalms begin with letters of the alphabet, forming an abecedarian acrostic (an acrostic that spells out the entire alphabet). The first examples of non-abecedarian acrostics come from ancient Greece, where the Erythraean Sybil (an oracle from the ancient Greek town of Erythrae) was known to write her prophesies on leaves and arrange them so that the first letters would spell out a word. Later, acrostics were commonly used in medieval literature to encode a secret message—for example, to disclose the name of the poet or the name of the poem's subject, especially in cases where the subject of the poem was a secret lover. Today, however, acrostics have lost some of the literary prestige they once enjoyed in the past. Instead, they are now often considered to be juvenile, or useful primarily as a comedic form. Acrostic Examples In the examples below, the letters that form the acrostich (the acrostic's hidden message) are bold. Acrostic in Lewis Carroll's "Acrostic" Not all languages delimit words expressly. Mandarin Chinese is a highly analytic language with few inflectional affixes, making it unnecessary to delimit words orthographically. However, there are many multiple-morpheme compounds in Mandarin, as well as a variety of bound morphemes that make it difficult to clearly determine what constitutes a word. [14] :56 Japanese uses orthographic cues to delimit words, such as switching between kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese writing) and the two kana syllabaries. This is a fairly soft rule, because content words can also be written in hiragana for effect, though if done extensively spaces are typically added to maintain legibility. Vietnamese orthography, although using the Latin alphabet, delimits monosyllabic morphemes rather than words. It is not clear if any categories other than interjection are universal parts of human language. The basic bipartite division that is ubiquitous in natural languages is that of nouns vs verbs. However, in some Wakashan and Salish languages, all content words may be understood as verbal in nature. In Lushootseed, a Salish language, all words with 'noun-like' meanings can be used predicatively, where they function like verb. For example, the word sbiaw can be understood as '(is a) coyote' rather than simply 'coyote'. [19] [3] :13:631 On the other hand, in Eskimo–Aleut languages all content words can be analyzed as nominal, with agentive nouns serving the role closest to verbs. Finally, in some Austronesian languages it is not clear whether the distinction is applicable and all words can be best described as interjections which can perform the roles of other categories. [3] :13:631

a b Robins, R. H. (1997). A short history of linguistics (4thed.). London. ISBN 0-582-24994-5. OCLC 35178602. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) Indivisibility: A speaker is told to say a sentence out loud, and then is told to say the sentence again with extra words added to it. Thus, I have lived in this village for ten years might become My family and I have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the word boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have infixes, which are put inside a root. Similarly, some have separable affixes: in the German sentence "Ich komme gut zu Hause an", the verb ankommen is separated. Potential pause: A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly, allowing for pauses. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries. However, this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words, or fail to separate two or more closely linked words (e.g. "to a" in "He went to a house").For those who write, this tool can be an excellent device to aid in the creative writing process. By In synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example, love) may inflect to have a number of different forms (for example, loves, loving, and loved). However, for some purposes these are not usually considered to be different words, but rather different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes. helpful. As you consider names, generate a number of random words and see how they impact what you have