Welcome. Could you give an example? (I'm thinking meta must be part of the word - I'm also thinking Anu used this as a weekly theme - tsuwm or an other [sic & ™] can look it up)
Welcome to the board, NBC - and the outlook over Wales is currently sunny!
I will be interested to see if tsuwm or some other wise owl digs up a special word for this. It's certainly a popular sport and a useful teaching tool - eg,
No, I don't know. I just have to take this opportunity to invoke Garrison Keillor's clever demonstration that the word "usage" is contained within the word "sausage", and likewise is the word "turd" within "Saturday". Then he spun some tale about having sausage dinners on Saturdays of his youth, and how that always disturbed him, somehow...
"Combinatorics" seems to be a likely suspect, but there appears to be a heavy mathematical emphasis on this form of study. There are several sites which discuss combinatorics specifically as it relates to the study of subwords.
With that, I'll give up and just wait for tsuwm to come to our rescue
notice the "link" part of charlinkade. the words listed in the two groups *link the characters of forestall. the word ore is also contained therein, but doesn't work.
there are other word games.. one that help with spelling (as your words within words does, i guess)
i learned to spell conscious.. because someone pointed out that the word had some science to it.. and after that, i never forgot the c--conscious in the middle.
Welcome aBoard, NBC. Golly, from your screen name, I thought maybe you were in charge of staff fun at NBC! But then I saw your bio--you and Rouspeteur share a career, as do WhitmanO'Neill and Flatlander (sort of), not to mention three-used-to-be-four attorneys, three docs, and a whole bunch of folk wot work with/on/in computers.
Actually, I think most people who misspell separate have a problem with the second syllable, and they write *seperate instead. Or at least I've seen it spelled like that numbers of times. And the rat is still there!
Hey! C'mon you guys! That's what I said : And separate has a rat in the middle Perhaps I should have written : And separate has "a rat" in the middle ... But after the discussion about over use of the quotation marks ... ?
but if you don't use quotation marks when 'appropriate', you might end up using nearly unreadable fonts, or *unusual* characters, or actually unreadable colors, or even [HORRORS] caps, just to add emphasis. not to mention writing almost entirely in lower case just to de-emphasize your ordinary musings.
But after the discussion about over use of the quotation marks...?
Good to know someone else is going through the same Quotation Mark Paranoia that I'm experiencing right now! Notice all the bold showing up in my posts lately?
notice the "link" part of charlinkade. the words listed in the two groups *link the characters of forestall. the word ore is also contained therein, but doesn't work.
In the word 'therein' there nests a veritable forest of linguistic creatures. And 'therein' itself nests in 'thereinbefore', an even more fertile progenitor of nested words.
As for agglutinative or pyramid or curtailed words, the longest string I've seen started with about 13 letters, but my favourite (only because I thought it up myself), at 11, is:
austringers astringers stringers stringer stinger stinge singe sing sin in I
An austringer, as I'm sure you all know, is a variant spelling (in OED) of the word for 'a keeper of goshawks'.
not, dear Marianna, it's the lack of vocal intonation in the written word that causes difficulties now and then ... happens to all of us. Here's another I had trouble with early on in spelling lessons : remember that cemetery is all "E"s - as in EEEEEE! A cemetery! And Sheriff was a problem until someone said : "The Sheriff is a Really Fine Fellow!" -- Sheriff : one R, two Fs.
Then there's infixes. In English I think they're mainly confined to swear words (absobloodylutely)but I believe there are languages where they're used just as much as we use prefixes and suffixes.
Dear Bingley: thanks for the word "infix". I don't remember seeing it before, and it could be handy.My dictionary gives the word "gemology" with the "o" as an infix.
P.S. All of the words ending in "ology" then are examples of use of "o" as an infix.
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not, dear Marianna, it's the lack of vocal intonation in the written word that causes difficulties now and then ... happens to all of us.
