Oxford Word Challenge

Book excerpt: Oxford Word Challenge is an enjoyable and stimulative mixture of entertainment and educative material, consisting of quizzes and puzzles for the reader to solve. The author, Tony Augarde, has created a wide variety of different word challenges for readers to try, including anagrams, acronyms,cryptic crossword clues, devil's dictionary, doublets, hermans, kangaroo words, palindromes, rebuses, spoonerisms, and stinky pinky. The first section allows readers to enjoy some comparatively easy questions: e.g. Which two rhyming words could mean 'an amusing rabbit'? Can you name a dozen trees starting with S? When you've warmed up, these fairly difficult questions will test you further: e.g. Which word means to open and to shut? Which actor has genuine class? Finally, you can take on the challenge of the fiendishly difficult problems! e.g. Which words have all the vowels in order? What is a boomslang, a demirep, a qualtagh, or a zugzwang? An answers section at the back of the book not only gives solutions, but also adds relevant background information wherever possible, including word origins and interesting stories about how words are used.