Joshua Blackburn has compiled a treasure-trove of the humorous, the obscure, the trivial and the surprising in this survey of our language.

The Language-Lovers Lexipedia: An A to Z of Linguistic Curiosities began as a quiz game invented by Joshua Blackburn to relieve the boredom of the Covid lockdown and to convince his sons that English ‘is endlessly fascinating’. He called the game ‘League of the Lexicon’, and when he also began to play it with friends, it became ‘something of an obsession’ and ended up being launched on the internet and becoming one of Mensa America’s ‘Recommended Games’.

Now, in the book, Blackburn shares many of the rabbit holes that the game led him to explore. You can read it, he says,

From back to front to back if you wish. Or diagonally, obliquely, occasionally or carelessly. Every entry points to other entries, so after exploring one rabbit hole there’s always another to dive down.

And the rabbit holes he leads you down range from ‘Abracadabra’ and ‘Advertising Slogans in Latin’ to ‘Zyzziva’: (a tropical beetle seemingly named by naturalists to ‘bag the last spot in the dictionary’ (OED 1971) before the Merriam-Webster’s ‘zyzzogeton’ ousted it from this position.

Blackburn, like Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Elephant’s Child’, is clearly full of ‘satiable curiosity’, and he also has a fine sense of humour. So, Lexipedia is the sort of book where even random exploration prompts the reader to annoy those who happen to be sitting nearby (for me this is usually my long-suffering husband) by reading out curious and/or funny snippets. Such as this note under ‘Thingammies’:

The first thingammy was what-d’ye call ’em, which the Oxford English Doodad dates to 1473. People have been coming up with names for things they can’t remember the names for ever since.

This is followed by a list of 44 thingammies, including ‘doodad’ and my new favourites ‘whangdoodle’ and ‘tiddlypush’, plus ‘pointything’ for the TV remote control.

Or, under ‘Mountweazels’, which were ‘invented by the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary as a copyright trap for dictionary plagiarists’, this example:

Jungtfax (n.)

A Persian bird, the male of which had only one wing on the right side, and the female only one wing on the left side. (Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, 1943)

Opening the book at random one comes across ‘Mudballs’, ‘Pen Names’, ‘Bee’s Knees’, ‘Farts’, ‘Pig Latin’, ‘Ikea Product Naming’, and ‘Aussie Abbreviations’ including ‘barbie’ (barbecue), ‘garbo’ (garbage collector), ‘rego’ (car registration) etc. Aussies send recyclable throw-outs to the ‘Salvos’ (Salvation Army) charity shop rather than leaving them for the garbos. This section is accompanied by a ‘Barry Humphries Glossary’ that ‘readers of a sensitive disposition’ are advised to skip ‘for something more wholesome’.

There are strange and wonderful entries, each of which has subsections exploring meaning, usage and the odd facts that Blackburn obviously enjoyed and wanted to share, but there is serious information here, too, such as the history of the ampersand, and of hash-marks and emoticons.

There are also several pages devoted to ‘Lexipedia People’, one of whom, Anne Fisher (1719–1778) is of special note since she published the first simple book of grammar, which became a bestseller, and she was also ‘a teacher, an author, an entrepreneur and an all-round remarkable woman’. Blackburn’s note lists her many publishing accomplishments, her founding of a newspaper, the printing business she co-ran with her husband, and the girls’ school she established and ran for four years. It ends with the dry comment that ‘she also had nine children’.

The book ends with several appendices including a list of collective nouns for animals, a page about the composition of the English alphabet (not ‘as straightforward as one might imagine’), plus some notes linked to earlier entries and a ‘Library’ of ‘books for language lovers’.

Blackburn, as a ‘writer, photographer and Maker of Things’, clearly had a lot of fun exploring rabbit holes in the world of language and, as the flyer that came to me with this book rightly says, his Lexipedia is ‘catnip for curious minds’, especially if you want to become fluent in Scottish insults or learn to use Elizabethan colours like ‘Ape’s Laugh’ and ‘Lustie Gallant’.

Just writing this review has made me return to Lexipedia again and again, each time finding something more to enjoy. My only complaint is that this compact book has very small print.

Joshua Blackburn The Language-Lover’s Lexipedia Bloomsbury 2025 HB 240pp $34.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

You can buy The Language-Lover’s Lexipedia from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.