The Phrontistery


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New and Updated Pages

May 2021

Seven years, huh? Well. I'm a busy guy with my day job and don't have much free time for this place anymore. Still, the site's been running well enough and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. One small but significant change is that I have removed all ads from the site. Once upon a time, in poorer times (for me), financial support was needed to keep this place up and running, and advertising actually produced meaningful revenue. That hasn't been true for a long time; ads don't make what they once did and they are a distraction, particularly on phones. I will (probably) put up a Paypal link for anyone who chooses to support the site, and books purchased through links on this site continue to generate a small Amazon Associates fee.

July 2014

As part of this summer's major content update, I have updated all the International House of Logorrhea alphabetical word lists. In total, with 1335 new words added there are now over 17,000 unique word entries on these lists. Over the next few weeks, I will be updating the glossaries as well to reflect new entries there, as well as adding a few new glossaries.

June 2014

I have added two new glossaries to the site: Rhetorical Devices lists over 150 rhetorical and literary devices both well-known and obscure. Words about Words is just what it sounds like: a list of around 150 words about words themselves. I have a few more lists nearly ready to go up and you can expect them in the weeks to come.

Still on the horizon, but on the agenda for the immediate future, is a complete refresh of all the alphabetical word lists and the glossaries to include words added over the past couple of years to my big database. When it's up, all of those pages will be completely refreshed and there will be around 1500 new words on the site!

August 2013

Lots more changes lately. I moved the Google search bar to its own page because keeping it in the sidebar was creating all sorts of havoc with the page layout for people using tablets, smartphones, and computers with smaller monitors. I'm still not quite sure what was going on there, but anyway, until I can find another solution, having the search as a separate page seems to be a reasonable workaround.

I've made a major addition to the Sottisier, my collection of weird and ridiculous emails I've received over the years. There was a time when I thought that adding a lot of disclaimers on my contact page would reduce the insanity. I was wrong, wrong, wrong, and I suppose the beneficiary is you, if you like to read that kind of thing.

I've changed the fonts on the site, using embedded open-source fonts so that readers should have similar viewing experiences regardless of their browser or hardware. For those who are interested, the text of the pages is now in Cyntho Pro, while the headers and titles are in Hammersmith One.

Last but certainly not least, I've added four new glossaries to the site (the first new lists in several years). Musical Instruments lists over 150 weird and unusual musical instruments outside those commonly encountered. Sesquipedalian Words includes the 100 or so longest words on the site. Signs, Symbols, and Accents describes words for unusual signs, symbols, punctuation marks, accents, and similar characters. Finally, Nonsense Words has over 80 words meaning roughly 'nonsense'.

July 2013

If you are a long-time reader of the Phrontistery, you may have noticed some pretty substantial changes around here. So far, these are mostly cosmetic - replacing the lengthy list of pages in the sidebar with a fancy new drop-down menu, and links to new content from my academic blog, Glossographia. Much of the site hadn't been updated since 2007 - and some of it, not since 2004 or earlier - and the look and feel of the site was getting rather dated, to say the least. The site was still functional - everything worked - but it was becoming a relic.

So I was faced with a choice, either to leave the site essentially as is, and let it age gracefully, or to take the time and energy needed to modernize it. Ultimately the deciding factor was established by looking at my site statistics - even after all these years, the Phrontistery still gets nearly 500,000 unique visitors per month, and much of that traffic is from users on tablets, smartphones, netbooks, and other devices for which the old site was simply not adequate. It's still certainly not perfect - I do all my own site coding by hand, despite my lack of formal training in web design - but I am confident that it is ready for its 2013 readers. Please do let me know if you are having difficulty viewing the site, and if so, what medium you are using. As always, eternal gratitude to my wife, Julia Pope, for her work designing the new site banner and services beyond the call of duty to the cause of site design.

There are a few additions right away to the site content. I have written a detailed Phront-History outlining the various changes and moves that the site has gone through ever since its inception in 1996 when I was still an undergraduate. Needless to say, the site is drastically different than it was in those benighted days. I've created a general index page for the over 30 glossaries of words on specific topics, and a general page for numerals and numeration material on the site. I've also reinstated the long-dormant Google custom search function for the site, since it seems to work substantially better than in the past. Now that the site is looking fresh and working well (I hope), I have lots of new content to put up in the next couple of months.



I hope you have found this site to be useful. If you have any corrections, additions, or comments, please contact me. Please note that I am not able to respond to all requests. Please consult a major dictionary before e-mailing your query. All material on this page © 1996-2021 Stephen Chrisomalis. Links to this page may be made without permission.

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