Dave Morice's latest book, The Dictionary of Wordplay (Teachers & Writers), is his seventeenth published effort to paint the alphabetic rainbow of the amazing English language. Previous works include eleven volumes of poetry, four books on wordplay and writing, three on cartooning, and a book on computers.

Why a dictionary of wordplay?

"Wordplay is always just a word or two away from the words we speak, hear, read, and write," Morice writes in the introduction to his dictionary. "It is present in the home, the school, the office, the store, the streets. It's on television all the time, especially on ABC."

He got the idea for a wordplay dictionary while editing the "Kickshaws" column for Word Ways magazine. The more familiar Morice became with contemporary wordplay, the more it seemed inevitable that he should write a dictionary. Surprised none had been compiled, he morphed the appendix to his doctoral dissertation-"Wordplay in Children's Picture Books"-into an appendix of wordplay terms that eventually grew into a full-blown dictionary.

With the recent publication of The Dictionary of Wordplay, Morice has given life to an astounding work. Indeed, The Times Literary Supplement of London, in a rare burst of approval, calls it "The most ingenious publication of the century so far" (TLS, March 23, 2001).

The Dictionary of Wordplay is for all lovers of language. For die-hard crossword puzzle workers, jumble fanatics, or Scrabble players as well as writers, educators, and linguistics, it's a "must-have" for the home or office reference shelf. Here are some samples from the 1,234 entries:

· Charade: A set of words formed by re-spacing-but not rearranging-the letters of another word, phrase, or sentence:

BEDEVIL = BED + EVILPLEASURE = PLEA + SURE CRUMBLED = CRUMB + LEDCHICAGO = CHIC + AGO

·Exquisite Corpse: Three or four players write an article and an adjective on a sheet of paper and then fold the paper to cover the words. The players exchange papers, add a noun to the new paper, and fold the paper again. They repeat this procedure with a verb and then with another article and adjective, and they finish with another noun. The results are read aloud to general bafflement.

·Hidden Middle Name or Overlapping Word: Take a person's first and last name and see if the letters join in the middle to form another name or word: oMAR SHArif, daLE Evans, ezRA Pound, and hORATIO Nelson

·TWENTY NINE: Write out the number 29 in capital letters: TWENTY NINE. Then count the number of straight lines in the number's name. It's the only number that counts the straight lines in its name. There are 29!"

A native of St. Louis, Dave Morice lives in Iowa City, where he earned an M.F.A at the renowned Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He is presently at work on the ever-expanding second edition to The Dictionary of Wordplay as well as The Dictionary of Incredible Words. His poems and cartoons have appeared in hundreds of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Word Ways, and The Actualist Anthology. Such disparate publications as the Village Voice and The Wall Street Journal have featured him and his work.

Lovers of word games and other forms of word and letter play should also check out Morice's Alphabet Avenue: Wordplay In The Fast Lane (Chicago Review Press)-353 pages of palindromes, word and letter puzzles, anagrams, panagrams, and puns-and The Adventures of Dr. Alphabet (Teachers & Writers), which presents 104 unusual ways to write poetry in the class and the community.

--James Denigan, freelance writer

The dictionary of wordplay is a totally different kind of dictionary. You can read it at any point and discover something you didn't know about language. It's more fun to jump around in it instead of gulping it down all of it at once. It is like a smorgasbord with many, many different types of food. You will get to sample such delicacies as bananagrams, flip-flop definitions, hyperhyphenation, Kangaroo words, no-word alphabets, Romantic numbers, sex change charades, stinky buzzwords, truthful numbers, and zazzification. I specially enjoyed searching for other kinds of palindromes ( my favorite since I first heard about them from a teacher in grade school), because they appear in different places as well as under a palindrome.

Reading a dictionary may not sound like a lot of fun, but this is a book you can pick up & start reading anywhere. Morice appeals on many levels, but behind it all is the way that he is thoroughly enjoying himself & his work. The perfect book to read during lunch hour on an impossible day or to keep on hand as a mental pick me up. A reference book written by a gifted story teller.

This book is so hysterically and funny in parts, it hurts. You will just recover your breath when you start laughing again. And, it's not the latest stand-up collection from a comic. It's the latest collection of flubs and foibles of one of the world's most complicated and misunderstood languages: English. Richard Lederer, the unofficial king of language, has produced another gem. This should be right alongside Anguished English and The Bride of Anguished English on your bookshelf.

If you've read (and enjoyed!) Anguished English or More Anguished English, this book is the natural sequel and should bring many a belly laugh or tear of joy (depending on your predilections). It gave me both.

Poetry Comics: An Animated Anthology by Dave Morice is breathes visual panache and a graphic novel style foray into classic poetry. These black-and-white comic-style panels have an avant-garde modern effect adding a unique twist, such as a rendition of Edgar Allen Poe's classic "The Raven" with an undertone theme concerning the superhero comic industry and its failings. A new way to look at grand old poetry, Poetry Comics is a unique and effective addition to traditional classroom instruction or homeschooling curriculum for poetry appreciation.

David Morice's Poetry Comics combines a love of poetry with a love of comics and it is a lot of fun. Classic poems (and some new ones) are treated like the scripts for comic books. Characters speak the lines (or story boxes narrate them) while comic book art illustrates the poem. Actually, most of time, the pictures comment on the poem or take it into an entirely new direction.

At its simplest one tree says to another, a real babe, as it offers an acorn, "I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree". Joyce Kilmer's famous poetic line becomes a pick-up line. The same sort of taking the poet at his word is the illustration of Ezra Pound's "In A Station of in the Metro": "The Apparition of these faces in a crowd; petals on a wet, black bough", that classic Imagist line, becomes a poet looking at a bunch of faces on the leaves of a wet branch-and it is kind of creepy.

Poetic revision is taken to a new level in Ben Jonson's "Celia" and Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time". Both poems become Romance Comics. Celia loses her man to this chick in a black dress. "To the Virgins" takes us through a love affair, a car accident, a marriage, and lost love. And, of course, large tears role down many a cheek in both stories.

I love the variety of the drawing. Shakespeare's sonnet 18, "Shall I Compare Thee to A Summer's Day", becomes a sort of Monsters' Ball. Sonnet 130, "My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing like the Sun", becomes an anatomy chart. "A Song" by Thomas Carew has "Frank and Ernest" type elephants who act like people. Remember the children's book?

Morice's pictures create narratives that transform some poems. In the new version of Robert Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi", one mouse woos another while cats chase both. The hero of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" becomes a faceless comic book reader who tries to live out his fantasies about Lenore through a super hero called "The Raven".

For the most part Morice gives us the words straight and creates new images. However, I love the sheer comic book fantasy of Walt Whitman as a super hero. Morice raids several poems to give us the story of "Whit-man": He is sitting in his chair drinking beer and watching TV when suddenly he springs into action to fly into outer space to meet an alien threat. I had no idea that that was the real story behind Leaves of Grass. However, "singing the body electric" should have given me a clue.

The T.S. Eliot "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" drawings actually give us some literary scholarship. Did Eliot name J. Alfred Prufrock after a St. Louis Furniture store? The historical Prufrock Building and the real company calendar appear in Morice's strip.

In every sense, Morice's comics are a revision. He makes us think about each line, sometimes each word in a new way. Teachers would like this. But doesn't he do the sort of thing we used to hide from our teachers? Did you ever draw Steinbeck's "Red Pony" on the inside cover of your book? Or sketch Hester Prynne's Scarlet Letter while your teacher droned on? However, his publisher, Teachers and Writers Collaborative, apparently think this is educational. They asked Morice to write an introduction about the poem-cartoon combination as a natural one, William Blake and all that. I do really appreciate the "How to Make Poetry Comics" part in the back. I could never draw but that didn't stop me from making my own comics and if schools use this book to encourage kids to draw comics, well, ok.

Some of you may know that there have been earlier versions of Poetry Comics (two previous books and mimeographed editions that I used to find hidden in alternative magazine stores). All of them are now out of print. Morice reprints some old favorites and has drawn new ones like "The Raven" and John Ashbery's "The Trees".

This is the kind of book you read in the bookstore and then bring home and put in the living room. My kids like it. I also like looking at the cartoon Shakespeare on the cover. Shakespeare gets the Andy Warhol treatment. Multiple versions of the same portrait appear in different colors as if he were Warhol's Marilyn Monroe. Throughout Poetry Comics the muse gets funky.

I've been teaching high school creative writing for twenty plus years and nothing, and I mean NOTHING!, has revolutionized how we teach that class more than this little book. Our students are spray painting their cars, then writing poems on them. They're writing poetry inside and outside refrigerators, stoves, on chairs and tables, on the sidewalks, on their father's army boots, on toilets, and yes, they've even written on the kitchen sink. We've been asked to give inservices to other educators about this project. It's nothing short of sensational and Dave Morice is our hero! Don't buy one of these books, buy a dozen for all of your teacher friends. This technique makes kids want to be creative. All age groups will find good stuff here.

In this highly entertaining book, punmaster Richard Lederer reveals the tricks of the punster's trade while challenging readers to create original wordplay of their own. In sixteen chapters, with titles such as "Calling on the Homophone," "Puns That Babylon," and "Tairy Fales," the author explains how to use homophones, homographs, and spoonerisms for comical effect while exploring knock-knock jokes, Tom Swifties, and other types of jokes and riddles based on the deft manipulation of sound and meaning. The author presents a clear and simple explanation of each form, provides numerous examples, and then invites readers to create original jokes, rhymes, and puzzles of their own. Language-lovers of all ages will appreciate the wealth of wit and humor presented on these pages.

My third-grade daughter couldn't put this book down! Absolutely loved the "Pun Fun" section and the "'Let's play a Game' said Tom Swiftly" section. The booked is marked up and dog-eared.

It's found in the sea like pirate's loot
Cut off its tail, and now it's a fruit
Cut off its tail once more and you read
The name of a vegetable small as a seed (Lederer 116)

After reading Richard Lederer's The Word Circus you will be able to look at riddles like these and come up with the answers. The Word Circus is a fun way to become more alert to the words we use every day. Lederer makes you think about words, and he relates them to the circus. His entire book takes you through a circus; he starts with the barker who introduces the book and tells you what you should expect to see in the chapters following. He introduces you to things such as grammargrams, words that are pronounced and consistent only of letter sounds. Like the word cutie, which could be written as QT. He also talks about anagrams, beheadment, curtailment, palindromes, semordnilabs, acrobatic words, charade words and kangaroo words, all different ways to look and play with words. Lederer has fun with words and after reading his book it is easy to begin playing with words yourself. It is a great book to accompany any class studying the elements of words, or just for someone who wants to become more aware of the English language.

Word Circus is a wonderfully entertaining look at the English language. The cartoon illustrations are a great addition. Well worth a look if you are interested in the many different ways the English language can be used to amuse, or confuse.

I never dreamt there could be a book about language that was so much fun. Richard Lederer's text truly creates a circus, complete with acrobats, clowns, animal tamers, lions, tigers--wow! Dave Morice's hilarious cartoons leap off the page and fly through the air with the greatest of ease. There must be at least 300 drawings in so many different styles that there's a surprise on every page. It's amazing that Lederer and Morice have produced a book where words and pictures interact as perfectly as they do. I've never seen this done so well before. This must be the greatest, most entertaining wordplay book of all. I hope they put together a new show soon! Encore!

There is a lot of stuff in this book... some fun, little funny, and a lot that's dumb. If the book was intended just as a historical collection of the clever and corny, it succeeded, but if every entry was meant to entertain, it fell short. I do not regret the purchase and recommend it... just don't expect to do a lot of laughing (but you'll chuckle from time to time.)

This is a very hilarious book