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C.W. Hooper of Keswick sent this creation to the Strand in August 1901: “It contains all the letters of the alphabet, twenty-six in all. They can be traced with patience. The letter N is the smallest (in the centre), and is the only indistinct one.”

This poem, by Lewis Carroll, can be read line by line in the conventional way, but the same text results when it’s scanned “downward” in columns, reading the first word of each of the six lines, then the second, and so on: I often wondered when I cursed Often feared where I would be -- Wondered where she'd yield her love, When I yield,...

Obscure words from the personal collection of Eric Albert, from a Word Ways article in November 1988: agroof: face downward amphoric: resembling the sound produced by blowing into a bottle benedict: an apparently confirmed bachelor who marries bort: the fragments removed from diamonds in cutting callipygian: having shapely buttocks charette: a period of intense group work to meet a deadline clishmaclaver: gossip crepitaculum: the...

In 1940, George Gamow published Mr Tompkins in Wonderland, in which a bank clerk attends a lecture on relativity and then finds that Einstein’s principles have become apparent in the ordinary street scenes before him: A single cyclist was coming slowly down the street and, as he approached, Mr Tompkins’s eyes opened wide with astonishment. For the bicycle and the young man on it...

“A Lowlands Holiday Ends in Enjoyable Inactivity,” a poem by Miles Kington: In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass? Inertia, hilarious, accrues, hélas! In certain British dialects, the two lines sound the same.

An invertible word made of impossible letters, by Basile Morin: An emphatic assertion by Douglas Hofstadter: In 1908, after observing that chump in cursive reads largely the same upside down, the Strand asked for similar specimens and received this:

Writing in the New Yorker in 1949, John Davenport documented a rising language he’d observed among his countrymen. He called it Slurvian. “When Slurvians travel abroad, they go to visit farn (or forn) countries to see what the farners do that’s different from the way we Murcans do things. While in farn countries, they refer to themselves as Murcan tersts, and usually say they...

Charles Craik of Weston-super-Mare received this enigmatic postcard from a friend in 1901 and sent it on to the Strand: I think it rather cleverly done, and it took me some time before I could understand its meaning. The principal message is on the big island in the centre of the map — an invitation to meet the sender at a café, with the...

But despite the gaiety of his song, Balso did not feel sure of himself. He thought of the Phoenix Excrementi, a race of men he had invented one Sunday afternoon while in bed, and trembled, thinking he might well meet one in this place. And he had good cause to tremble, for the Phoenix Excrementi eat themselves, digest themselves, and give birth to themselves...

While at Eton, Winston Churchill’s son Randolph was “immensely impressed” to hear his friend Freddie Furneaux recite the following passage without notes. Ostensibly it’s about Henry VIII: “This monarch was sincere, open, gallant, liberal, intrepid, inflexible and courageous; but with these virtues he combined the vices of violence, cruelty, profusion, rapacity, obstinacy, injustice, arrogance, presumption and conceit.” When Churchill asked the source of the...

An odd detail from the autobiography of Bertrand Russell: “The summers of 1903 and 1904 we spent at Churt and Tilford. I made a practice of wandering about the common every night from eleven till one, by which means I came to know the three different noises made by night-jars.” He adds, “(Most people only know one.)” He says nothing more.

In a set of weights, no weight exceeds 10 kg. If the set is divided arbitrarily into two groups, the combined mass of one of these groups also will not exceed 10 kg. What’s the greatest possible mass of the full set of weights?

“A red rose absorbs all colours but red; red is therefore the one colour that it is not.” — Aleister Crowley, of all people

Some personal names used in the land moiety of the Miwok people of Northern California, listed in Brian Bibby’s Deeper Than Gold: Indian Life in the Sierra Foothills, 2005: akaino: bear holding its head up engeto: bear bending its foot in a particular manner while walking esege: bear showing its teeth when cross etumu: bear warming itself in the sun sutuluye: bear making noise...

Paris newspapers once carried an ad offering a cheap and pleasant way of travelling for the price of 25 centimes. Several simpletons mailed this sum. Each received a letter of the following content: ‘Sir, rest at peace in bed and remember that the earth turns. At the 49th parallel — that of Paris — you travel more than 25,000 km a day. Should you...

There was a fence with spaces you Could look through if you wanted to. An architect who saw this thing Stood there one summer evening, Took out the spaces with great care And built a castle in the air. The fence was utterly dumbfounded: Each post stood there with nothing round it. A sight most terrible to see. (They charged it with indecency.) The...

“Marriage is the only legal contract which abrogates as between the parties all the laws that safeguard the particular relation to which it refers.” — Shaw

Kevin Purbhoo invented this vivid puzzle while a student at Northern Secondary School in Toronto: On a remote Norwegian mountain top, there is a huge checkerboard, 1000 squares wide and 1000 squares long, surrounded by steep cliffs to the north, south, east, and west. Each square is marked with an arrow pointing in one of the eight compass directions, so (with the possible exception...

A remarkable number of apparently intelligent people are baffled by the fact that a different group of apparently intelligent people profess to a knowledge of God when common sense tells them — the first group of apparently intelligent people — that knowledge is only a possibility in matters that can be demonstrated to be true or false, such as that the Bristol train leaves...

Occasionally, by coincidence, the gaps between words on a page of printed text will become aligned, producing “rivers” of white space that descend across multiple lines. These occur most commonly when the font is monospaced and justification is full. Because they’re distracting, these artifacts are generally discouraged; typographers sometimes view a printed page upside down in order to spot them. In ordinary text long...

Memorable passages from the pulp detective stories of Robert Leslie Bellem (1902-1968): “There were tears brimming on her azure peepers, and tremulous grief twisted her kisser.” (“Forgery’s Foil”) “She wrapped her arms around my neck; glued her crimson kisser to my lips. She fed me an osculation that sent seven thousand volts of electricity past my tonsils.” (“Design for Dying”) “And then, from the...

Unusual personal names collected by the Society for the Verification and Enjoyment of Fascinating Names of Actual Persons, listed by curator Allan Fotheringham in 1991: Procter R. Hug Polly Wanda Crocker Sexious Boonjug Philander Philpott Pettibone Zilpher Spittle Petrus J.G. Prink Burke Uzzle Pansy Reamsbottom Dunwoody Zook Bastion Hello Fang W. Wang Montague Tyrwhitt-Drake Nimrod Spong Dulcie Pillage Jake Moak Sir Tufton Beamish Sir...

What do you call a person from Connecticut? Today we’d call them a Connecticuter or a Connecticutian (or, colloquially, a Nutmegger), but in a 1987 address etymologist Allen Walker Read announced that he’d also found these options: Connecticotian, used in 1702 by Cotton Mather Connecticutensian, used in 1781 by historian Samuel Peters Connectican, used in 1942 in a letter to the Baltimore Evening Sun...