Self-referential

• four
• eighteen characters
• nineteen letters long
• forty characters long (including spaces)
• forty-six characters in length (not counting spaces)
• nonhyphenated
• mispelled
• noun
• word
• sesquipedalian
• CAPITALIZED
• This sentence is in the active voice.
• This sentence is always true.
• You have almost finished reading this sentence; now you have finished it.

Today's Words: pixilated/pixelated

pixilated/pixillated or pixelated/pixellated: There doesn't seem to be a consensus yet about whether to use one ell or two, but there are very different meanings to these two words. Pixellated refers to what happens when you zoom too far into a JPEG and start to see individual squares (pixels, but blown up). Pixellated letters lead to jaggies, those jagged curves (although anti-aliasing has largely smoothed the jaggies down). One the other hand, pixillated has been around longer. It comes from an irregular form of the word pixie and means "somewhat unbalanced mentally." I don't know about you, but I often feel pixillated after a long day of staring at a computer screen...

Recursion

[There used to be a photo here that i linked to at Language Log. I don't remember exactly what it was, and the link has apparently broken. I'm sure it was just hilarious, though. 4/13/06]

Today's Word: steatopygous

steatopygous (don't ask me how to pronounce it): having an embarassment of riches in the, ah, patootie. Having a lot of junk in the trunk. "In her steatopygous youth, Jennifer Lopez served drinks off her hind end."

Today's Word: nephelology

nephelology: The study of clouds. A nephelologist is one involved in the scientific study of clouds, or, alternatively, a day-dreamer — someone whose head is always in the clouds.

Word Game: The Incredible Shrinking (or Growing) Word

The idea behind this game is to start with a long word and eliminate one letter at a time. Every time you eliminate a letter, the remaining letters must spell another word. (Okay, so it's actually a bit easier to start with a one-letter word and build up to a larger word.) Here are two decent examples:
cremated   o
created   or
create   ora
crate   oral
rate   coral
ate   choral
at   chorale
a   chorales

What's the longest word you can come up with?

Today's Word: defenestrate

defenestrate: to throw someone or something out the window. Apparently, Prague has historically been a center for defenestration — of royalty, of dissidents, of religious leaders, and of unknowns. "Litter defenestration carries a heavy fine on California highways."

Today's Word: pedicular

pedicular: Lousy. A great insult to slip in when one is expecting the word particular. "I've dated a lot of women in my time, but this pedicular date is on in a million."

Today's Word: acerebral

acerebral: without a brain. A wonderful insult that I'm waiting to hear in a presidential debate — even more insulting than "hare-brained."

Today's Word: palimpsest

palimpsest: writing material which is used multiple times after the original writings have been erased or painted over. Also something that shows extreme diversity in layers beneath the surface. "We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. . . . Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light." — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale