Less Well Known Cousins

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 one ordinary word has an anagram with an obscure meaning. Like the less well-known cousin of a celebrity. Quite often only one of the two words will fit on the board and you don’t even have to shuffle the letters around looking for a hard to find word if you remember them as a couplet. e.g. LEATHER HALTERE. Hmm, you can see why I thought it was an article of clothing….

AVAILED BARISTA BONDAGE ESPOUSE

ETHICAL FEATHER GREASED IMPALED

INVADED PATTERN PATTIES PEACHES

PEASANT PLAITED RADIANT ROMANCE

SATIATE TEABAGS UNLOADS WELSHES

All of those 7 letter words have a less well known cousin. There might be one or two tricky ones in the above list, but you would probably find most of them. However, how many of their anagrams can you find?

This is sort of a two way quiz, because the words on the next list are too unusual for intermediate or junior players.

So if you are a really experienced player you should pause here for a moment and test yourself before you move on.

However less experienced players should move straight on to the next list and see if they can spot the more ordinary words in the list that they have just seen by unscrambling the letters of the more unusual words below.

VEDALIA An Australian ladybird

BARTSIA A wild flower of the broomrape family native to Europe and Asia

DOGBANE A perennial herbaceous plant with poisonous milky juice

POSEUSE A female poseur

ALETHIC Pertaining to truth or possibility

TEREFAH Not ritually clean or kosher

DRAGEES Sugar coated candies

IMPLEAD To sue someone in a court of law

VIDENDA The plural of VIDENDUM which is something to be seen

REPTANT An adjective meaning creeping or crawling

TAPETIS A TAPETI is a small South American hare

CAPEESH Do you undestand? Also CAPICHE, CAPISCE, CAPISH

ANAPEST A group of syllables in poetic rhythm

TALIPED A person afflicted with a clubfoot

INTRADA A musical prelude

CREMONA An ancient double-reed wind instrument

AETATIS A Latin term meaning “at the age of”

ATABEGS ATABEG is a Turkish ruler or high official. Also ATABEK

SOULDAN The monarch or ruler of a Muslim country

SHEWELS Scarecrows, but used to scare away deer rather than birds

Like LEATHER HALTERE my idea of the meaning of REPTANT was wrong. In my mind I thought it was something to do with repeating, as in a repeating pattern. As you can see it turned out to be something completely different

Happy Scrabbling

Patrick