verbarium
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From Latin verbum (“word”) + -arium.
Noun
[edit]verbarium (uncountable)
- (dated) A word game in which the players are given a set of letters and must form as many words as possible from subsets of those letters.
- 1889, 'anonymous subscriber', “Indoor Games”, in The Christian Union, volume 40, page 311:
- We have played Verbarium with great pleasure, dividing the company into two sections or sides.
- c. 1908, Mark Twain, Dorothy Quick - Her April Fool's Anecdote:
- […] next she would play euchre twenty minutes; next it would be a game of verbarium, and so on all the day long—twenty minutes to each fleeting interest, with twenty minutes of billiards sandwiched between every two of them.