Word

My favourite word in the English language is »language«. However, if you gave me a slightly larger set of words to choose from I might have more difficulty expressing a preference.

Words are like prodigies. They may want to stay inside where it is safe and warm but they'll never live if they never play outside...and find themselves lost in the cold.

A word has the power to define, to bind, to create, to destroy. Truely, a poet has power undreamt of by kings.

“Be careful what you say—you may have to eat your words.”

I don’t think so much about eating my words as about wearing them. When someone sees me, the words come back to haunt like a miasma around me. No matter how colourful my dress, bad words turn everything grey and muddy brown.

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Words like winter snowflakes.

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 – Homer (c. 700 B.C.)
 – The Iliad, bk. III, l. 222

Have you ever noticed that the only difference between »word« and »weird« are the vowels?

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Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

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 – Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
 – An Essay on Criticism [1711], pt. II, l. 109

Spaces define which letters go together to make up a word.

A man of words and not of deeds
Is like a garden full of weeds.

Rotor is a fine palindrome, thought Frank Leigh Dearie as he ambled down the Lost Highway.

mortar my words
with particles
prepositions
adverbs
and conjunctions

Think how much acceptance Mary showed when she said:

»Let it be done to me according to thy word.«

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Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

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 – Horace (65-8 B.C.)
 – Epistles, bk. I, epistle xviii, l. 71

Which is more useful to you: a dictionary that tells you how to use a word or a dictionary that tells you how a word is used?