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Aug 4, 2025
This week’s themeLewis Carroll This week’s words rabbit hole phlizz jabberwock white knight boojum 
Recreation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Piccadilly Circus, London
Photo: Valerie Hinojosa Previous week’s theme Misc words 
A.Word.A.Day
with Anu GargMaybe you’ve won a Nobel Prize. Or an Olympic gold. Or both (If so, congratulations! You’ve achieved Peak Overachiever. Mom must be ecstatic.) But here’s a different kind of feat: Have you ever coined a word that actually made it into a dictionary? If yes, I bow in your general direction and offer a freshly coined word in your honor: lexicongratulations. To put it in perspective: Each year, about a dozen people win a Nobel. Each Olympics, around 300 gold medals are awarded. But how many people can say they’ve added a word to the language? Lewis Carroll did it. Dozens of times. From chortle to outgrabe, his coinages live on. Some nonsense, some surprisingly useful, all delightfully inventive. We’ve featured some of his creations in the past. This week, we tumble once again down the Carrollian rabbit hole. And now it’s your turn: Have you coined a word? We’d love to see it. It may not end up in Oxford, but it might end up in our hearts, and inbox. Share below or email us at words@wordsmith.org. Be sure to include your location (city, state). Important: Before you send your lexical gem, give it a quick Google. Someone else may have already had your brillig idea. PS: If you’re a Nobel laureate or Olympic gold medalist and you’ve coined a word, please drop us a line. We may faint, but we’ll recover, eventually. If you meet two out of three criteria, we still want to hear from you. Seriously, any one of the three is lovely. Drop us a line. rabbit hole
PRONUNCIATION:
(RAB-it hohl)
MEANING:
noun: 1. A bizarre, confusing, or disorienting situation that’s hard to exit. 2. A lengthy and often unproductive detour, especially one involving a series of tangents (as in online browsing). ETYMOLOGY:
From the rabbit hole into which Alice falls in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The term was first used literally, for
an entrance to a rabbit warren in 1667, and metaphorically from 1938.
NOTES:
In Carroll’s story, the rabbit hole is the gateway to Wonderland,
a realm of logic-defying oddities. Today, going down a rabbit hole can
mean falling into a world of confusion or simply getting sucked into an
unexpectedly deep dive, whether into conspiracy theories, cat videos, or
Wikipedia browsing.
USAGE:
“Milarepa, a tenth-century aristocrat ... began meditating so that he could learn sorcery, to get back at his neighbors. He ended up going down a contemplative rabbit hole,
dedicating his life to meditation, writing poetry, and living in a cave.” Elizabeth Widdicombe; The Higher Life; The New Yorker; Jul 6, 2015. See more usage examples of rabbit hole in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another,
telling people that order and security will be restored if it weren't for
those who don't look like us or don't sound like us or don't pray like we
do, that's an old playbook. It's as old as time. And in a healthy democracy
it doesn't work. Our antibodies kick in, and people of goodwill from across
the political spectrum call out the bigots and the fearmongers, and work to
compromise and get things done and promote the better angels of our nature.
-Barack Obama, 44th US President (b. 4 Aug 1961)
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