Announcing The Journal of Wordplay

Where there's a will, there's a Word Ways.

I am now taking submissions for a new online magazine, The Journal of Wordplay. This is a scholarly journal, free to submit and free to read. Publication will be four times a year. (We may accelerate in 2024.)

Anyone who’s interested in the study of wordplay is welcome to send me material. (My email is tcampbell1000@gmail.com and my Discord is at TCampbell#3820. If you’d prefer other means of getting in touch, leave a comment on this post and we’ll sort something out.)

Tentative deadline for the first issue is April 21, but anything that misses the first-issue deadline is certainly eligible for the second.

For forty-two years, wordplay lovers had a scholarly publication devoted to studying their passion. The quarterly magazine was called Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics. It had studies of all kinds of language oddities, including the lipograms I’ve been discussing here and much, much more. Its full archive is still available at Butler University’s website. Below is a screenshot from its last issue, showing the kind of material it ran.

In its run, Word Ways had several editors, the last of which was Jeremiah Farrell. Sadly, Farrell suspended publication of Word Ways in 2020. He’d hoped to resume it, but passed away last year. Jim Puder briefly filled the gap with the e-mail publication Interim, but as the name implied, it was not a permanent replacement. Its final issue was early last year, too.

I heard about Farrell’s passing months after it had happened. I realized no one was coming forth to fill the role in wordplay scholarship that Word Ways had occupied.

So I did.

Puder was happy to share with me some initial thoughts about the labor involved, and several Word Ways submitters have already come forward.

My ambitions for this journal are modest. I just want there to be a place to publish and find wordplay studies. But there are a few things we’ll be doing differently than Word Ways:

While I’m interested in all subjects that the original Word Ways covered, I’m especially interested in articles that Word Ways couldn’t have run, either because of the limitations of black-and-white print, or because their subject matter didn’t exist a few years ago. This includes articles on GPT, Wordle, and similar apps, as well as newer research on crosswords and other word games. Pieces that use color are welcome here as they were in Interim.

And while the original team of Word Ways contributors are sure to have bylines, I will be soliciting new voices to the best of my ability. We will reprint or reference work that’s been published elsewhere, if it fits our purview. If you have an idea for a wordplay study—or just want to be sure you’re notified when we publish—please see my contact info above and get in touch.

Thanks to all who’ve come forward to support this idea already. This’ll be fun.