Word Play

English is amongst the wordiest languages. Perhaps the wordiest. It boasts of a million plus words. 80% of which are borrowed from other languages. Contrast it with French, which has some 10,000 words. An average educated english-speaking person has a basket of 20,000 words! Although we use about 2000 words a week. Words fall into categories and patterns. I have attempted to put together a list of word classification which, in practice, are easy to identify with and often used, but their nomenclature is not necessarily so.

1. Antonyms: Opposites
2. Synonyms: Reason why Thesaurus is in business.
3. Buzzword: a popular word relating to a particular activity or subject
   1. Calibrate Expectation | Outside the box | Push the envelope | Sea change | Boil the ocean | Cloud Computing | Integrated Marketing
4. Catchword: a popular word relating to a particular idea, class or quality.
   1. Sexy
5. Demonym: word used to refer to one’s origin or country.
   1. Example Parisian, Indian, Egyptian
6. Derivation: a word that comes from another language
7. False friend: a pair of words that sounds similar in 2 languages but have different meanings.
   1. Actual in English and Aktuell (at present) in German
   2. Stanza in Italian means room
   3. Carte (card, menu) in French and cart in English
   4. Adept (proficient) and Adepte (follower) in French
   5. Affluent (wealthy) and Affluent (tributary of a river) in French.
   6. After in German means anus.
   7. Apologie is praise in French
8. Homograph = Homo (similar) + Graph (writing). Words which are written identically but mean and are often pronounced differently.
   1. Bark: Dog | Tree
   2. Beat: with a stick | Music
   3. Axes: plural of both axis and axe.
   4. Compound: Chemical | Playground
   5. Content: ingredients | satisfied
   6. Now that you have got the hang of it try these: Bat | Bow | Coordinates | Bust | Desert | Digest | Discount | Fine | Lead | Minute | Object | Produce | Putting | Refuse | Row | Second | Subject | Tear | Wind | Wound | Lie | Lead | Close | Bear | Bank | Back | Bar | Capture | Change | Conduct | Console | Contest | Converse | Convert | Defect | Foot | Letter | Light | Live | Match | May | Mind | Park | Rock | Rose | Spirit | Transport | Yard | Wave
9. Homophone = Homo (similar) + Phone (Sound). Word pairs with similar pronunciation but different meanings and spellings.