Every night around midnight, my little e-mail chime goes off — and there, in my Inbox, is another word to add to my vocabulary. Each week brings a...
Every night around midnight, my little e-mail chime goes off — and there, in my Inbox, is another word to add to my vocabulary. Each week brings a different category of words. A couple of weeks ago, the theme was “collective nouns” (“a bevy of birds,” “a sounder of swine”). The previous week, it was “metaphorical terms having origins in New York.”
More than 600,000 subscribers receive “A.Word.a.Day” (AWAD) every day, in more than 200 countries. To subscribe, all you have to do is visit www.wordsmith.org.
AWAD and Wordsmith.org are the brainchildren of Woodinville-based Anu Garg, whose second book has just come out. Titled “Another Word a Day: An All-New Romp Through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English” (Wiley, $14.95), it offers 52 categories of words. One category, “Words to Describe Your Opponents,” delivers such riches as “facinorous” (extremely wicked), “dasypygal” (hairy-buttocked) and “ventripotent” (big-bellied or gluttonous).
If you’d like to get your logomania from the mouth of the man himself, you can see him at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Seattle Central Library; free (206-386-4636 or www.spl.org), and at 6:30p.m. Oct. 15, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park; free (206-366-3333 or www.thirdplacebooks.com).
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Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times book critic