Words are endlessly fascinating. Just ask my friend who inspired this week’s offshoot by showing me this tweet. In earlier issues of this newsletter, we’ve been amused by various forms of wordplay like puns or wonderful properties possessed by homonyms that make listening to thoughtfully strung-together words a delight. It’s interesting to discover that this playfulness extends to the written word as well.
As the forever curious people at QI informed us on Twitter, some words look like the very thing they represent. Their example: bed. Yes, the word bed looks like a bed (with vertical posts at either side and an e in the center), and I am ashamed to admit I’ve never noticed. Other people have been fascinated by this word for different reasons: like its etymology, or simply the object’s pure functionality. As the British PM, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, confessed:
An engglyph (English + glyph) is not an officially defined term and hence, alternative neologisms for the concept have been proposed, for instance, eyenomatopoeia or visual onomatopoeia. Others suggest calling such words automorphs (combining “self” and “shape”). How they originate is something of a mystery, except when it isn’t. A fun example is the word delta, defined as:
A triangular tract of sediment deposited at the mouth of a river, typically where it diverges into several outlets.
Origin: Mid 16th century: originally specifically as the Delta (of the River Nile), from the shape of the Greek letter.
Naming something after a shape sounds silly until you think about other common words that have been quite directly coined to describe things like U-turns or V-neck T-shirts. This specific phenomenon of letters describing the shape of the object has also been observed by Jeff Miller in his book Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia. He simply calls them shape words (originally coined by Dan Tilque).
He attempts to show one word for each letter of the alphabet, but several letters are missing. His list: A-frame, C-clamp, D ring, f-hole, F clamp, G clamp, H hinge, I beam, J-bar lift, K truss, K-turn, L square, M roof, O-ring, P trap, S curve, T-shirt, T-intersection, T-bone, T-square, U-turn, V neck, W-engine, X truss, Y theodolite, and Z bar. [Mark Brader and Phil Jacknis added to Dan's list.]
This is the simplest form. When you play around with it further, it morphs into a calligram, i.e., a text arranged in a way that creates a thematically related visual representation. Here’s a French calligram by Guillaume Apollinaire, describing his lover. In fact, specific words used in the image correspond to the position of the body part they’re mentioning (e.g. la bouche for the mouth).
This concept has been given a new lease on life with the help of Ji Lee's book, Word As Image. A collection of 90 pictures, it presents creatively altered words as examples of visual onomatopoeia. Pushing the boundaries of the written word further, he even released an animated version of the book. The static ones look like this:
While it all seems hieroglyphic in nature (hieroglyph is defined as “a picture or symbol representing an object, concept, or sound”), these words do require the reader to use a little bit of imagination (though not as much as everyone’s favorite font from the late 2000s, Wingdings).
A related concept is that of autological words, i.e., words that are themselves an example of what they’re referring to. How self-centered. For example, the word word is a word and noun is a noun and suffixed has a suffix. Other autological words are: polysyllabic, unhyphenated, sesquipedalian (a long word meaning “long word” derived from the Latin for “a foot and a half long”), and many more. Meanwhile, the other non-meta, non-self-referential words that do not describe themselves are called heterological e.g. monosyllabic, the damned liar.
But this raises the question: is the word heterological heterological? If yes, then it becomes autological by definition, which means it isn’t describing itself. But if no, then heterological is heterological, which actually makes it autological. Is the Grelling–Nelson paradox too much for you on a Saturday morning? Go back to bed, reader.
But before you do, if you liked today’s offshoot, share it with a horizontal friend and help them graduate from childish visual onomatopoeia like entering 1300135 in a calculator. Don’t be greedy now.