What do you call someone who loves words?
If you slow down over a good word, or keep one in your pocket for later, there is a name for you. Several, in fact.
If you have ever stopped mid-sentence because a word was suddenly interesting, or kept a favourite one in your pocket for weeks waiting to use it, there is a name for you. A person who loves words is a logophile. It comes straight from Greek: logos, “word,” and philos, “loving.” A lover of words, said plainly.
It is a small comfort to learn that the thing you do has a name, and an old one. You are not the first, and you are in a very large and pleasant company.
Logophile: the plain name
Logophile is the everyday word, and it does exactly what it says. The same -phile ending sits at the end of a whole family of enthusiasms, from bibliophile, a lover of books, to oenophile, a lover of wine. Put logos in front and you have someone who feels about words the way other people feel about a good bottle: worth slowing down for, worth talking about, better when shared.
Philologist: the serious cousin
Long before logophile, there was philology, literally “the love of words,” and for centuries it was the grand name for the study of language and old texts. A philologist was a serious reader who traced how words and writings had changed over time.
The great dictionaries were built by philologists and, just as importantly, by amateurs. The Oxford English Dictionary was assembled partly from slips of paper mailed in by thousands of ordinary readers, each one reporting where they had spotted a word in the wild. It turns out that loving words has always been a slightly participatory hobby. People cannot resist sending in a good find.
Verbivore: the hungry cousin
The most enjoyable name is the newest. The writer Richard Lederer coined verbivore, one who devours words, on the model of carnivore and herbivore. It is for the reader who does not merely like words but feeds on them, who reads the backs of cereal boxes and the fine print for the sheer pleasure of the language.
Alongside it sits the lexophile, the one who loves wordplay best of all: puns, anagrams, and the happy accidents of spelling. Different appetites, same table.
The club has no dues
Whatever name you choose, the membership is easy. You do not need a degree or a large vocabulary, only the small daily willingness to be surprised by a word you thought you already knew. That is the whole of it. A logophile is simply someone who never quite got over how strange and good words are.
The Monthly Lemma is a magazine for exactly these people. Each issue takes one everyday word, follows it back to its root, and arrives printed in the mail: one good word a month, and the whole world behind it.
A word like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of The Monthly Lemma, printed and posted to your door. A quietly perfect gift for anyone who loves words.