winkle

Pronounced: WING-kuhl, verb

Notes: This word is more common in the UK; it was a borderline case for me

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Yesterday’s word

The word opisthograph is “a text written on both front and back” (can refer to paper, stone, parchment, etc).

First usage

Our word came into English in the early 1600s

Background / Comments

The Word-of-the-Day calendars (one of my reference material) is an opisthograph, with one side having the word, its pronunciation, and meaning, and the other side having interesting information about the word or its background. Cartoon calendars tend to NOT be opisthographs because they are blank on one side (and thus they make nice scratch paper for me). As you probably did, I recognized the word “graph” in our word and suspected that it had something to do with writing. In fact, our word came from the Greek words opistho- (back) and -graph (writing).