Word Ways

Word Ways
Cover of the November 2013 issue
EditorJeremiah Farrell
CategoriesRecreational linguistics
FrequencyQuarterly
Publisher
First issue1968
CountryUSA
Based inIndianapolis, Indiana
Websitedigitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/
ISSN0043-7980
OCLC1604435

Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics is a quarterly magazine on recreational linguistics, logology and word play. It was established by Dmitri Borgmann in 1968 at the behest of Martin Gardner.[1][2][3][4] Howard Bergerson took over as editor-in-chief for 1969, but stepped down when Greenwood Periodicals dropped the publication.[1][3][5] A. Ross Eckler Jr., a statistician at Bell Labs, became editor until 2006,[3][5] when he was succeeded by Jeremiah Farrell (Butler University).[6]

Word Ways was the first periodical devoted exclusively to word play, and has become the foremost publication in that field.[3][7] Lying "on the midpoint of a spectrum from popular magazine to scholarly journal",[5] it publishes articles on various linguistic oddities and creative use of language. This includes research into and demonstrations of anagrams, pangrams, lipograms, tautonyms, univocalics, word ladders, palindromes[8] and unusually long words,[4][5][9][10][11] as well as book reviews, literature surveys, investigations into questionable logological claims, puzzles and quizzes, mnemonics[12] and a small measure of linguistically oriented fiction.[5][13]

Willard R. Espy discovered Word Ways in 1972, and eventually used material from several dozen articles in his Almanac of Words at Play anthologies.[9][14][15][16] 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.[17]

In the November 2020 issue, editor Jeremiah Farrell announced that the publication of Word Ways would be suspended.[18]

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  18. ^ Farrell, Jeremiah (November 2020). "More Word Ways?". Word Ways. 53 (3): 4. Retrieved 19 September 2020.