Wye's Dictionary of Improbable Words

Craig Conley

High Brow Pencil Press, Jan 18, 2009 - Reference - 384 pages

Wye's Dictionary of Improbable Words brings together nearly 4,000 unusual and fascinating words that defy convention, offering a vast sampling of our living language at play. As our standard dictionaries scramble to catalog and thereby legitimize our growing vocabulary, Wye's Dictionary offers the casual word gamer and language lover a cutting edge collection of new words. Examples of usage abound-as old as the Bible and as current as blog postings-grounding extraordinary terms in ordinary contexts. Myriad genres are represented, from literary classics to dramatic plays to whimsical fantasies, as well as the diverse worlds of science fiction, romance novels, children's stories, historical and military accounts, graphic novels and comic books, travel reports, news articles, magazine features, poetry, song lyrics, birdwatching guides, hymns, and how-to manuals.

About the author

CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as "America's most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation." He has been called a "language fanatic" by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, and a "cult hero" by Publisher's Weekly. An eccentric scholar, Conley's ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the "virtual pet" in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular "Tamagotchi" in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley's website is OneLetterWords.com.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Wye's Dictionary of Improbable Words
• Author: Craig Conley
• Publisher: High Brow Pencil Press, 2009
• ISBN: 1441455272, 9781441455277
• Length: 384 pages
• Subjects: Reference / Dictionaries