As someone who likes word play and grammatical games and enjoys the intricacies of the English language (I’m one of very few, I know), I thought it was about time I wrote a blog on the subject.

Everyone knows the most common examples of word play (”The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every letter of the alphabet, for instance) but, did you know:

“Typewriter” is the longest word that can be made using letters only on a single row of the keyboard. “Stewardesses” is the longest word typed with only the left hand and “lollipop” is the longest word typed only with the right hand.

There are only two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order - abstemious and facetious - and only four words that end in “dous” - tremendous, horrendous, stupendous and hazardous. Similarly, “dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”. (Prove me wrong if you can - I like a challenge.)

Everyone knows that nothing rhymes with “orange”, but does anything rhyme with ”silver”, “purple” or “month”?

Palindrones are words that are the same whether they are read left-to-right or right-to-left, e.g. “racecar”, “kayak” and “level”.

And, finally, a “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second, so be careful when you tell people you’ll have that report done for them “in a jiffy”!

Rebecca Wheeler