The Oxford Guide to Word Games (Oxford Paperback Reference) - Softcover

Augarde, Tony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192820052 ISBN 13: 9780192820051

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 1986

Synopsis

In this highly entertaining guide to all kinds of word games and word play, Tony Augarde reveals the origins of the games, outlines their history, and describes how to play them. The perfect companion to Augarde's new Oxford Dictionary of Word Games , it features: * charades, Twenty Questions, and hangman * acrostics, crosswords, and Scrabble * puns, riddles, tongue-twisters, and spoonerisms * the longest word in the English language This book is intended for general; word game enthusiasts, crossword and Scrabble fans, etc.

About this title

Review

The newly updated Oxford Guide to Word Games, now complete with a short section on the jolly joys of text messaging, is full of such delights and splendid inconsequential fun as the fact that "synthetic cream" is an anagram of Manchester City or that "Marge lets Norah see Sharon's telegram" is a perfect palindrome. Do you know (or no) your homonyms from your heteronyms, perhaps invalid or enjoyed by invalids? Or try this tongue twister: "She was a thistle sifter and sifted thistles through a thistle sieve"

Acrostics, chronograms, spoonerisms, charades and pangrams all jostle for space in this witty and entertaining book which manages to include a history of the crossword puzzle and of Scrabble alongside how to play lexical ping-pong or how to crack a rebus such as EGNC for Aegean Sea. What is the longest word used by Shakespeare? Honorificabilitudinitatibus in Love's Labour's Lost. A Latin ablative plural, it means literally "with honourableness"; Augarde observes that "the word is also interesting for its long regular succession of alternate consonants and vowels.

Oxford Guide to Word Games manages to be pretty scholarly although it wears its learning lightly. It gathers together a lot of historical and etymological information which you'd be hard put to find anywhere else in a single volume. Anyone who has a love affair with words and their quirks needs this. So do students of English language and, of course, it's essential reading for quiz compilers everywhere. --Susan Elkin

Review

First published in 1984, it quickly became a bestseller and is now reissued with new chapters. -- Sunday Times, June 1, 2003

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0192820052
• ISBN 13: 9780192820051
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256