I was watching a David Attenborough nature program and learned the meaning of a word I had seen many times. The word was HALTERE. I had imagined it was a word of French origin for some article of clothing or something. I certainly had no idea that it was the remnant of the rear wing of a fly that had evolved to be like a sort of gyroscope. That got me thinking. The only reason I knew the word was that it was the anagram of LEATHER. There are other combinations like that where

The quiz for this week is to write down the 4 letter words you can think of that start with the letters DOU. DOU is not a word, so these are not hook words to add to a word already on the board. It is a vocabulary test, so just work your way through the alphabet deciding what letters added after those 3 will make a word. We don’t tend to start words with that combination. That is one reason why interesting bingos such as DOULEIA (inferior veneration accorded to saints and ang

This blog is mostly about 4 and 5 letter words that begin with the letters UP. In fact the quiz is to see how many of the 4 letter words you can think of before we move on to the list. It sounds easy doesn’t it? In fact some of them are easy and there are only a total of 7 words in all, but I will be surprised if you manage to get all 7. The blog needs to be filled in with another list first so that you can’t immediately see the answers to the quiz. Stop right here and write

One of the tricky areas of word study is knowing what –ING words can have an S added to them. Just to demonstrate the difficulty the only quiz this week is on which of the four –ING words in the title can have an S added to them. Clearly ARGUING, TESTING, TRIALING and PROVING are all correct, but how do you feel about ARGUINGS, TESTINGS, TRIALINGS and PROVINGS? If the word can be used as a noun it should be able to take an S. For example the word SETTING can obviously take a