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Your favourite word
What is your favourite word — and do you actually use it, or do you just like owning it?
Some words are tools you reach for; others are treasures you keep. Ask what a word does for you if you never use it.
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Your answer
A little context
Someone asks for your favourite word, and you have one ready. It might be petrichor, coined by two Australian scientists in 1964 for the smell of rain on dry ground. Often it's a word you almost never get to say. You keep it the way you keep a stone from a beach, and asking what it's for feels a little rude.
Nearby questions
- Have you ever made up a word because no real one fit?Families and friends keep words nobody else knows. Wittgenstein doubted a word could mean anything if only one person could check it.
- Can you think without words?Wittgenstein wrote that the limits of his language meant the limits of his world. Yet everyone has felt something they had no word for.
- Is the sentence 'This sentence is false' true or false?If it's true, then it's false. If it's false, then it's true. The puzzle is more than two thousand years old.
- When you say 'I'm fine', are you lying?A story improved in the telling, a confident guess, an 'I'm fine' at the dinner table: plenty of what we say isn't trying to inform anyone.
- What does a name change?When you give something a name — a pet, a car, a machine — what changes: the thing, what you owe it, or you?
