Written by the founder of the wildly popular A Word A Day Web site (www.wordsmith.org), this collection of unusual, obscure, and exotic English words will delight writers, scholars, crossword puzzlers, and word buffs of every ilk. The words are grouped in intriguing categories that range from "Portmanteaux" to "Words That Make the Spell-Checker Ineffective." each entry includes a concise definition, etymology, and usage example–and many feature fascinating and hilarious commentaries by A Word A Day subscribers and the authors.
The New York Times
A Word of the Day Keeps Banality at Bay. ... A delightful, quirky collection.
St Petersburg Times
Only Anu Garg, the founder of Wordsmith.org, can make word facts this much fun. His book, A Word a Day is full of this stuff, with chapter names like Words for Body Parts That Are Used Metaphorically, Words Not to Put on Your Resume and Words That Make One Say, 'I Didn't Know There Was a Word for That!' Garg writes This book is an expression of the joy of words, the magic of words, the music of words - a real yawnfest for bibliophobes (people who hate books), but a side-splitting lesson plan for bibliophiles and word lovers.
Richard Lederer, author of The Miracle of Language
A banquet of words! Feast and be nourished!
Barbara Wallraff - Senior Editor at The Atlantic Monthly and author of Word Court
Anu Garg’s many readers await their A Word A Day rations hungrily. Now at last here’s a feast for them and other verbivores. Eat up!
John Simpson, Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary
AWADies will be familiar with Anu Garg’s refreshing approach to words words are fun and they have fascinating histories. The people who use them have curious stories to tell too, and this collection incorporates some of the correspondence received by the editors at the AWAD site, from advice on how to outsmart your opponent in a duel (or even a truel) to a cluster of your favorite mondegreens.
Part memoir and part education (or lack thereof), The Know-It-All chronicles NPR contributor A.J. Jacobs's hilarious, enlightening, and seemingly impossible quest to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
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Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
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British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
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Richard Lederer, author of The Miracle of Language
