Gramogram

A Gramogram or Grammagram or Letteral Word is a letter or group of letters which can be pronounced to form one or more words, as in "CU" for "See you".[1][2][3] They are a subset of rebuses,[4] and are commonly misunderstood for abbreviations.

They are commonly used as a component of cryptic crossword clues.[1]

A poem reportedly appeared in the Woman's Home Companion of July 1903 using many grammagrams: it was preceded by the line "ICQ out so that I can CU have fun translating the sound FX of this poem".[2]

A restaurant scene where a customer initially asks "FUNEX" ("Have you any eggs") appears in a 1949 book Hail fellow well met by Seymour Hicks[5] and was performed in The Two Ronnies under the title Swedish made simple.[6]

The book How to Double the Meaning of Life devotes three pages to gramograms, to which the author, Anil, gives the name Letteral words.[4]

As of December 2016 neither spelling of the word appears in the online Oxford English Dictionary.

Some are homophones because some can be used for multiple words.

Examples for words

Examples of names

Examples for suffixes

References

  1. 1 2 "Cryptic crossword reference lists > Gramograms". Highlight Press. Retrieved 31 December 2016.
  2. 1 2 "Grammagrams". Audrey Deal. Retrieved 31 December 2016.
  3. ↑ "Grammagrams". Wordnik. Retrieved 31 December 2016.
  4. 1 2 Anil. "Letteral Words". How to Double the Meaning of Life. Xlibris. pp. 237–239. ISBN 9781462871209. Retrieved 31 December 2016.
  5. ↑ Hicks, Sir Seymour (1949). Hail Fellow Well Met. Staples Press. p. 183. Retrieved 31 December 2016.
  6. ↑ Brennan, Ailis. "Ronnie Corbett dies: Here are his funniest seven sketches". GQ. Retrieved 31 December 2016.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.