Quiz

BuzzFeed Deputy Books Editor

Books

Everybody's heard about the word! A word, word, word, etymology's the word!

Can You Guess Which Famous Writer Created These Words?

From _Through the Looking-Glass: and What Alice Found There_: "‘O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ He chortled in his joy."

It's Lewis Carroll!

"Superman" is a translation of "Übermensch" — from Nietzsche's _Also sprach Zarathustra_.

It's Nietzsche!

From _Macbeth_: "Stop vp th'accesse, and passage to Remorse, That no compunctious visitings of Nature Shake my fell purpose."

It's Shakespeare!

From _The Pickwick Papers_: "Fired a musket..rushed into wine shop..back again—whiz, bang."

It's Dickens!

From his biography of Marilyn Monroe, _Marilyn_: "Factoids..that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority."

It's Norman Mailer!

From _Christine_: "Then shut your pie-hole."

It's Stephen King!

From _Bleak House_: "chronic malady of boredom."

From _Gulliver's Travels_: "The Fore-feet of the Yahoo differed from my Hands in nothing else, but the Length of the Nails, the Coarseness and Brownness of the Palms, and the Hairiness on the Backs."

It's Jonathan Swift!

From _Paradise Lost_: "A solemn Councel forthwith to be held At Pandæmonium, the high Capital Of Satan and his Peers" and "About the walls Of Pandæmonium, Citie and proud seate Of Lucifer."

It's Milton!

From _The Selfish Gene_: "We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme... It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches."

It's Dawkins!

Solid effort! You're not a word expert yet, but you're on your way! Time to hit the books and study up on some etymology.

Amazing! Your knowledge of the origins of words surely must impress your friends. Color us impressed too. Well done.

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Can You Guess Which Famous Writer Created These Words?

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