Below is a sampling of entrees from one of the Washington Post’s most popular annual contests, the Neologism Contest, in which contestants are asked to create new words with various restrictions. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
CHANGE A WORD BY ONE LETTER
Guiltar: A musical instrument whose strings are pulled by your mother.
Eruditz: A philosophy professor who can’t figure out how to work the copying machine.
Skilljoy: The would-be friend who’s a bit better than you at everything.
Sparadigm: A model panhandler.
SPELL A WORD BACKWARD:
Nword: Something that gets you in really deep trouble.
Onisac: A dark, often smoke-filled chamber in which elderly Homo sapiens deposit their nest eggs before dying.
WORDS ENDING IN -ION
Errudition: Comical misuse of big words. “Madam, your dress looks positively superfluous on you tonight,” he said with amazing errudition.
Percycution: Giving your child a name he will hate for the rest of his life.
WORDS CONTAINING A BLOCK OF THREE CONSECUTIVE LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET
Coughin: A small enclosure designed especially for smokers.
PORTMANTEAU (OVERLAPPING) WORDS
Treadmillstone: The unused home gym that keeps staring at you.
Crapplause: A polite but unenthusiastic expression of approval.
PALINDROME TERM
AHA HAHA: When you finally get the joke.
MOVE A WORD’S FIRST LETTER TO THE END
Carecrows: Women who are so devoted to their men that they frighten them away.
13-LETTER WORDS
Typochondriac: A paranoid proofreader.
COMBINE THE BEGINNING AND END OF TWO WORDS FROM THE DAY’S PAPER
Prob-solutely: A definite maybe.
Ignorial: A monument that nobody visits.