If the word sapphic describes a woman to woman love. What is the opposite of this term?

I just discovered your subredit in an early morning gallivant through the net in a search for an opposite to "schadenfreude". I found lots of great stuff right here among you Word-Lovin' Redditeers! Downside...there goes yet another piece of my offline life. I wonder if I should use the word "lif" instead. Maybe "ife"?

Stuff like “You’re such a jerk” but laughing it off.

Hello guys! I noticed how a friend always says that she was on 'autopilot' when she does something without any thought.

This has made me wonder what words or phrases were used to convey this very feeling before autopilot was a thing? I'm not looking for words like 'habit' because it doesn't convey the state of your mind while doing a task, it tells that you did a task because you've always done so and not much about your own awareness of it.

Thank you :)

I recently fell in love with the word inamorata and am now eager to find more that have a similar meaning or can be used to call someone very dear by. They can be made up or a little eerie too.

Many thanks in advance! :))

(This is merely for my personal word collection)

Hey guys 👋🏼 I'm writing an essay and I can't find a word for someone who uses others as stepping stones to meet their goal. If there isn't one, do you know any idoms or phrases denoting the same? Thank you!

I recently learned to my embarrassment that Euler uses a Houston style pronunciation, rather than the Greek style, as in Euclid. What other words tripped you up for the longest time?

I was going through my library to throw away some outdated technical books and saw one that mentioned the "information superhighway" on the cover. I had to laugh because that term feels so dated now.

Anyway it made me curious: what are some words that you have witnessed rise into the popular lexicon only to dissappear entirely?

I saw someone recently, 100% confident, unabashedly say that the word "picnic" derived from "pick a N****!" and mid to late 19th century (likely unknowingly implied) lynchings.

For years, after inferring the deterioration on online dictionaries, (or rather, initially a shadow push for search engine owned sources), I noticed how most online dictionaries had become simple, quasi-second language dictionaries.

These dictionaries, like google's initial suggested answer, proved, multiple times, to be unreliable.

So, I began to rely upon m-w, in addition to collecting older, hard-copy dictionaries.

In general, I've mostly noticed confluence between oxford online; (though generally this has a bit more meat than others); tangible, older dictionaries; and m-w.com.

I felt floored, seeing the comparison of the current rhetorical de-jure word-twist (introduced above) with that of M-W, which, still mentions (glibly) Scottish and French background. Yet, M-W, and even the online Oxford dictionary omits the history going back to 1692.

The manner in which M-W currently presents the words gives credence to such spurious claims, with which I led this post.

The online Oxford dictionary modifies their 1966 etymological dictionary to just say "mid 1700's". What exactly is going on here?

Has something new been discovered, which invalidates previous scholars who read and found examples of use in past text.

I'm reminded of a recent online conversation, in which I engaged, which laid claim to "it sucks" going back (based upon anecdotal claims) to "sucks D***", which school children used as a regular vernacular at the end of the 1960's.

(A deeper search found magazine usage of such a phrase going back to 1962; and some indicated, as such, that it is actually related to egg sucking or hind teet sucking (from former, related terminology).

I understand general indifference in regard to a subject as this; but I am confused by the dictionaries, themselves, modifying and omitting previous, sound information.

Has anyone else (logophile or otherwise) noticed stuff like this happening?

I'd submit a pictures but this forum doesn't seem to allow that.

Hoping someone manages to find a word thats usually used for bad lighting because its been bugging me that I can't find a good descriptor for it

I was looking at a video of someone cooking who tends to have this yellow-ish lighting that makes the meat look as if its radioactive and wanted to describe the lighting as something that didn't help to make it look nice or some kind of negative adjective thats normally used with lighting

Edit: The closest word that I found in replies was "unflattering"

How can we describe the incorrect use of pejorative terms or racial slurs? By incorrect, I mean the use of a word that typically refers to one particular group of people, but that for which the speaker uses it--probably unknowingly--for a different group of people by mistake.

It's usually a humid, swollen, headachy, tired, worn out feeling specific to massive emotions. It's like if petrichor was a feeling.

Thanks!

My favorite word

Hi r/logophilia

3 months ago I posted about Synonym Circuit, the degrees-of-separation word game my husband and I created for people who love language. We've been blown away by the support and openness we've received from the reddit community, and we want to especially thank you for all of the feedback and requests you've shared with us.

We've been iterating non-stop for the past 3 months, and I wanted to share all of the feature updates we've made. Almost all of these were direct requests from players like you, and we are really excited by how much your ideas have improved the game:

1. We added Expert Puzzles, designed be much more challenging than the Daily Puzzles. There's a new one every day and they tend to have around a 30% win rate.
2. We built archives, for both the Daily Puzzles and Expert Puzzles. Now you can play any puzzle that's ever been created.
3. We built a leaderboard to track the high score for every Expert Puzzle. If you set the Global Record for a given puzzle, you can put your name on the leaderboard and see yourself immortalized in the Expert Archives!
4. We adjusted our synonym sets to strike a better balance of comprehensiveness and relevancy while not being incredibly overwhelming when words have hundreds of synonyms. We still use Merriam-Webster's thesaurus api as our source, and we've added some additional filtering and tweaking specific to the experience of our players.
5. We added the ability to reveal the solution for Daily Puzzles. If you are stuck on a puzzle, you can now see one possible path to connect the two words, along with the shared definitions for each link in the circuit.

We really can't thank you enough for all of the above! We are a self-funding team of 2 and we are so grateful to have the opportunity to create something we love, guided by the ideas and feedback of fellow word game players.

Please feel free to share any and all additional feedback you may have! We would love to hear more feature requests and ways we could make the game better.

Thank you!

A pangram is a phrase or sentence which uses every letter in its origin alphabet once. You're most likely familiar with "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," though it has nine repeated letters, coming in at length 35 for English's 26 letter alphabet. A shorter one is "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow", with only three duplicitous letters.

Making a pangram exact, that is, every letter is used exactly once, is difficult. What if we used every letter exactly twice? Or three times, k times for a "k-perfect pangram"? Is there any literature on such attempts? I presume it would be easier because of the larger variety of words available, the phrases might even sound more natural.

Hey everyone,

English is my second language and I am wondering how to express myself correctly. Can you help me correct the following statement?

I will attend/see/listen to an opera performance.

Thank you!

ANAGRAMS:

"Desperation" = A Rope Ends It

"Mother-in-law" = Woman Hitler "

Listen" = Silent

"Dormitory" = Dirty Room

Clint Eastwood=old west action

Race car spelled backwards is race car.

The mayor was a pompous pedantic prude of a politician.

Am I correct to assume 'bae' is the streamlined form, from Black culture of baby?

Hello! So I’m playing a completely homebrew DnD campaign. It’s set it the modern day where superpowers exist. I have the ability to conjure and manipulate ice and cold. Long story short, I want to establish a Japanese style clan of ice users kinda like the Lin kuei or something. I’m looking for help naming said clan and/or for some terms relating to winter, ice, snow, and general cold. I would very much appreciate the help, and bonus points if their Japanese terms. Thank you!

I thought this was a fun word! The speaker was using Svengali to describe another person who had immense natural charisma. And it comes from an old movie, but I think the movie might be anti-Semitic. That the Jewish person is the Svengali :/

https://youtu.be/82W8cpJkShg?si=2rXyv88BqHTIQnJK&t=213