Thanks to all who have participated in the Give Us A Clue contest in Crossed Wires over the past few months. We’ve been offered hundreds of excellent suggestions. Remember to look out for your definitions as clues in upcoming crosswords. We’re giving you a well-deserved break but we may bring back Give Us A [more…]
The January issue of Lovatts BIG Crossword is supporting the RSPCA, Australias best known and most trusted animal welfare organisation and the SPCA in New Zealand. Together each year, they accept hundreds of thousands of animals from the public and investigate thousands of complaints of animal cruelty and neglect.
Both organisations actively work to promote cage-free [more…]
I often write about interesting new words coming into our language, but they come at a cost. Theyre now jostling with our older words for space in our dictionaries, the oldies being threatened with eviction.
In September 2008, the lexicographers at Collins dictionary started preparing for their forthcoming new edition and found that over 2,000 [more…]
Ive often said that the new words created in any era give us a snapshot of that time. Our present preoccupation with green issues is perfectly reflected in the latest additions to most dictionaries.
Collins Dictionary is obviously environmentally aware, with new phrases such as carbon footprint: a measure of the amount of carbon dioxide [more…]
You cant cure a cold or flu but everyone has their own method for relieving the symptoms. In fact, ask fifty people and youll get fifty different answers.
When our family came down with colds recently, we were given all sorts of advice regarding home remedies, but we find the old family favourite always works [more…]
With the Olympic Games upon us, its quite interesting to see the origins of the names of some Olympic sports.
The name Olympics comes from where it all started, in Olympia, a district in ancient Greece where athletic contests were held every four years.
Badminton is played with a battledore and shuttlecock. Battledore comes from the [more…]
The English language has the largest vocabulary of any language which is not surprising when you think that it is made up of Celtic, Germanic, Latin, Viking and French languages, not to mention all the words borrowed from Africa and Asia.
English is now the everyday speech of more than four hundred million people around [more…]
The word exotic comes from the Greek exotikos, literally from the outside. So if we had visited Ancient Greece, they may have described us as exotic, because they used it to mean foreign.
Exotic plants and birds come from another land, but exotic also means attractively strange, or maybe that should be strangely attractive. (Im [more…]
Easter will be here on 23rd March this year. In the Christian church, its a time of celebration, the end of the Lenten fasting period. To many people Easter is a time when people dressed as rabbits wander about the local shopping centre scaring children. It also means eating lots of chocolate eggs and [more…]
