Word Ways
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Cover of the November 2013 issue
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| Editor | Jeremiah Farrell |
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| Categories | Recreational linguistics |
| Frequency | Quarterly |
| Publisher |
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| First issue | 1968 |
| Website | wordways |
| ISSN | 0043-7980 |
| OCLC number | 1604435 |
Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics is a quarterly magazine on recreational linguistics and logology. It was established by Dmitri Borgmann in 1968 at the behest of Martin Gardner.Howard Bergerson took over as editor-in-chief for 1969, but stepped down when Greenwood Periodicals dropped the publication.A. Ross Eckler, Jr., a statistician at Bell Labs, became editor until 2006 when he was succeeded by Jeremiah Farrell (Butler University).
Word Ways was the first periodical devoted exclusively to wordplay, and has become the foremost publication in that field. Lying "on the midpoint of a spectrum from popular magazine to scholarly journal", it publishes articles on all sorts of linguistic oddities and creative use of language. This includes research into and demonstrations of anagrams, pangrams, lipograms, tautonyms, univocalics, word ladders, and unusually long words, as well as book reviews, literature surveys, investigations into questionable logological claims, puzzles and quizzes, and a small measure of linguistically oriented fiction.
Bestselling language author Willard R. Espy discovered Word Ways in 1972, and eventually used material from several dozen articles in his Almanac of Words at Play anthologies. The first of these included complete subscription details for Word Ways, which generated so many inquiries that for decades the publishers were reluctant to change their address.
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