Over the holiday break my husband and I became total addicts of a simple anagram game for the iPhone called Word Warp. Believe me, we had plenty of high tech gaming options, but we spent long, happy hours huddled around the iPhone, dreading the moment when we would fail to find the six-letter word that separated us from moving on to the next level, or Game Over. Although the game had options to extend our time limit, we kept to a strict two-minute timer. Our best game ever spanned two days (even addicts have to pause to eat and sleep), and we scored a whopping 51,680 points!
Word Warp is generally pretty good about making sure the all-important, six-letter word is vocabulary the average person would know. But we did discover a set of little three-letter words that we had never heard of before- and they came up over and over again.. We memorized these three-letter oddities, and it wasn't long before we had to know what they meant. Often these rare words were the names of birds or fish- not super interesting. But here were some of our favorite obscurities, a few of which have begun to come up in our everyday conversations:
ted- to spread out to dry (as in damp straw to dry for animal bedding)
ret- to soak to loosen the fibers of fibrous materials
ort- a morsel or scrap of leftover food
lea- meadow, pasture
A lot of these older, out-of-use words are related to farm life. But who among us never has some orts to scrape off the plate before loading it in the dishwasher? It's fun to get some use out of these old, three-letter gems.
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