25 Years of "A Word A Day"

At NAS, we’re long-time fans of Anu Garg, the creator of Wordsmith.org. Wordsmith.org publishes A.Word.A.Day, the Pangram Finder, the Internet Anagram Server, and more. Garg shares his delight with the English language to anyone with a web-browser. We’ve enjoyed Garg’s website enormously over the years, and we recommend it enthusiastically.

We published an interview with Garg in 2009, and we’re delighted to learn that Wordsmith.org is now celebrating its 25^th birthday—they’ve been going strong since 14 March 1994, when Garg posted zephyr, his first A.Word.A.Day. The website is organizing celebratory contests—send in a limerick, an anagram, or a pangram, and you might win—well, go and look on the Wordsmith.org website. It doesn’t matter what you might win; the fun is playing with words yourself.

Here in the NAS office, we got tempted by their limerick contest—“Write an original limerick to describe an event that happened during the last 25 years.” Someone in the office submitted this, about the college bribery scandal which has just hit the news:

Admissions said drop us a line
Admittance costs only a dime;
But then students failed
And the insiders bailed
And now quite a few may do time.

Send in a limerick of your own! Or an anagram or a pangram or coin a word. It’s the best fun this side of the Coney Island Cyclone.