The Right Word

The mole in molecules.  From The Story of a Secret and the Secret of a Story by Ismay Thorn, 1887.

These rows of asterisks are a veil of winking stars from the birth of creation, relating details that the author fears to describe.  From The Mythological Zoo by Oliver Herford, 1912.

Pine/rhyme.  If a near-rhyme falls in a pine forest and there's no one to hear it, does it make an assonance of itself?  Needles of Pine: Lines Without Rhyme by Charles Wellington Stone, 1886.

From The Elements of English Grammar by George Philip Krapp, 1908.

Here's an all-consonant word (or a sentence of one-letter words?) written on a wall by spirits with a candle.  (Truly, some of the most fascinating messages are written on walls with candles.)  It translates as, "Spirits of a higher order desire to communicate with you soon."  From Modern Spiritualism by Eliab Wilkinson Capron, 1855.   See Webster's Dictionary of Improbable Words: All-Consonant and All-Vowel Words as well as One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.

And how true those words are, even today.  From A Work on English Grammar & Composition by Clark & Maynard, 1877.

You may say to-may-toe or to-mah-toe, but it's actually "Tommatoo," and here's what it means.  From The Diamond Lens and Other Stories by Fitz-James O'Brien, 1887.

From Pure Logic by William Stanley Jevons, 1864.  The text reads, "Let it be borne in mind that the letters A, B, C, &c., as well as the marks +, 0, and =, afterwards to be introduced, are in no way mysterious symbols."  However, we found some rather mysterious meanings of A, B, C for our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary, and some even more mysterious meanings of &c for our book entitled Ampersand.

Three compound words for the lightheaded of society.  Madmoments, or First Verseattempts by a Bornnatural (Henry Ellison), 1839.

Have you ever communicated something and then, too late, wished you could revise it?  Joseph Smith simultaneously made a statement and a correction, bach in 1896.

For theologic read geologic, and for work read mark.  Corrections from Wilford's Microcosm, 1882.

"Whizzerinktums" is a word we've found only in Medical Pickwick, 1920s.

From English Lessons Book Two by the California State Text-Book Committee, 1903.

From The Phi Gamma Delta, 1918.

From Open Sesame: One Hundred Answers in Rhyme to William Bellamy's Century of Charades, 1895.

Shimmering and skimmering.  From A Glossary of Words Used in East Anglia by Walter Rye, 1895.

Life: A Romance by three asterisks, 1844.