Yea! We've just had the Budget announced in Australia, to the inevitable wailing of baffled interest groups and the whirring of spin placed on it by competing political groups. Did... read more
Read all the latest news!
This Week's Cash Prize Winner
PommiePete
623,271
49
Member since
03-12-2011
$100.00
Turn your tokens into cash!
Word of the day roman à clef
by Christine Lovatt
"based on a catty roman à clef by a former assistant of Vogue..."
A roman à clef is a novel in which real people or events appear, but have different names. In French it means 'novel with a key' and it gives the readers the added pleasure of working out who the thinly disguised characters are. For instance, Bill Clinton is called Jack Stanton in Primary Colors. The quote above refers to the film The Devil Wears Prada.
Visit the Players Lounge
Word Fact
by The Quizzard
The word GIRL appears only once in the Bible
According to a survey carried out by the Oxford English Dictionary, the most popular noun is TIME
The pound, or hash sign (#) is also called an OCTOTHORPE
Many peoples' favourite word, SERENDIPITY, comes from Serendip, the Persian name for Sri Lanka
The word AMATEUR comes from the French word for love, 'aime', as in playing for the love of it, whereas PROFESSIONAL stems from a person entering a religious order and professing their faith
A MORTGAGE was originally called a 'gage mort' from Latin words for payment pledge and dead
Canada's NEWFOUNDLAND was exactly that. Explorer John Cabot called it a new found isle, and the name more or less stuck
The only common English word with all its vowels in a row is QUEUING
FORTNIGHT, meaning 14 nights, never caught on in the US, but remains popular elsewhere, though 'sennight' for seven nights bit the dust some time in the 19th century
Nothing to do with driving, TAKING A BACK SEAT comes from sitting on the back benches of England's parliament