Logology (or ludolinguistics) is the field of recreational linguistics, an activity that encompasses a wide variety of

word game Word games are spoken, board, card or video games often designed to test ability with language or to explore its properties. Word games are generally used as a source of entertainment, but can additionally serve an educational purpose. Young ...

s and wordplay. The term is analogous to the term "

recreational mathematics Recreational mathematics is mathematics carried out for recreation (entertainment) rather than as a strictly research-and-application-based professional activity or as a part of a student's formal education. Although it is not necessarily limited ...

Overview

Some of the topics studied in logology are

lipogram A lipogram (from , ''leipográmmatos'', "leaving out a letter" is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided.McArthur, Tom (1992). ''The ...

acrostic An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the ''first'' letter (or syllable, or word) of each new line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word, message or the alphabet. The term comes from the Fre ...

palindrome A palindrome (Help:IPA/English, /ˈpæl.ɪn.droʊm/) is a word, palindromic number, number, phrase, or other sequence of symbols that reads the same backwards as forwards, such as ''madam'' or ''racecar'', the date "Twosday, 02/02/2020" and th ...

s, tautonyms, isograms, pangrams, bigrams, trigrams, tetragrams, transdeletion pyramids, and pangrammatic windows. The term ''logology'' was adopted by Dmitri Borgmann to refer to recreational linguistics.

Notable logologists

* Dmitri Borgmann * A. Ross Eckler, Jr. * Willard R. Espy * Jeremiah Farrell *

Martin Gardner Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914May 22, 2010) was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing magic, scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literatureespecially the writin ...

* Mike Keith *

Douglas Hofstadter Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born 15 February 1945) is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, Strange loop, strange ...

*Lila Maria de Coninck

References

Bibliography

Books

* * * * * * {{cite encyclopedia , last1=Johnson , first1=Dale D. , last2=von Hoff Johnson , first2=Bonnie , last3=Schlichting , first3=Kathleen , editor1-last=Baumann , editor1-first=James F. , editor2-last=Kame'enui , editor2-first=Edward J. , encyclopedia=Vocabulary Instruction: Research to Practice , title=Logology: Word and language play , year=2004 , publisher=Guildford Press , isbn=1-57230-933-4

Periodicals