Funk & Wagnalls
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10
MENTIONS
7
EPISODES
7
PODCASTS
Search complete. 10 mentions across 7 episodes found for "Funk & Wagnalls".
Nov 1, 2026
Adam BegleyGUEST
Oh, it's, um, I, I, I don't have a straightforward answer for you, but I think the closest I can come is that early on his name passed into the language.
Adam BegleyGUEST
So in 1920, for example, the Funk and Wagnalls, which is a big dictionary company in America included the word who denies in its dictionary, which meant of course to escape.
Adam BegleyGUEST
Um, and, um, People who don't know at all anything about Houdini know the word and know that it means if you're a Houdini that you can get out of an impossible situation or that you disappear.
Adam BegleyGUEST
He's a real Houdini.
Danielle HutchinsonHOST
What's, what's all that about?
Leisa CoffmanGUEST
Well, I, um, had this library, uh, Funk and Wagnalls, both of the owners are, lived in Ohio and went to college together.
Leisa CoffmanGUEST
And, um, and it first was, uh, Funk that owns the publishing house.
Leisa CoffmanGUEST
And he brought in Wagnalls later.
Leisa CoffmanGUEST
So anyway, I decided after the film festival, they were having the person that's over all of the history.
Leisa CoffmanGUEST
She was doing a talk on a Sunday, and I went to join that lecture.
Leisa CoffmanGUEST
And she was talking about the history of Funk and Wagnalls and all this.
Leisa CoffmanGUEST
So at this time, I knew nothing much about Funk and Wagnalls.
Peter SokolowskiGUEST
And what we found was that there were six or eight dictionaries and they didn't all have the same words.
Peter SokolowskiGUEST
And so you had Funk and Wagnalls, you had American Heritage, you had Webster's New World Dictionary, you had the New Oxford American Dictionary, you had later the Encarta.
Peter SokolowskiGUEST
There were other competing dictionaries that were legal according to the rules of Scrabble that you could use these for play.
Peter SokolowskiGUEST
Hasbro's agreement with these other publishers was that since Merriam-Webster was the publisher of the official Scrabble Players Dictionary, that we would collate all of the playable words, regardless of whether they came from Merriam-Webster's dictionary or from Funk and Wagnalls or American Heritage, and put them all in one home reference called the official Scrabble Players Dictionary.
Peter SokolowskiGUEST
So it's always been a very strange... product because it represents a kind of collaboration between all of these different publishers.
Peter SokolowskiGUEST
And of course, the intellectual property is actually owned by Hasbro, not by Merriam-Webster.
Dave SmithGUEST
Don't tell me.
Dave SmithGUEST
But when they say these words now, they no longer the definition you find in Funk and Wagnalls.
Dave SmithGUEST
They're the definition they create.
Dave SmithGUEST
When they call something community, it means my little tribe, my little cult, my little issue.
Austin LeeHOST
So the observers might've been confused by the shrouds actually just dissolving in that purge fluid from decomposition, making it look like they were eating it, but they really weren't.
Austin LeeHOST
Funk and Wagnalls claim this.
Austin LeeHOST
If a corpse about to be buried has its mouth open, it will probably be a vampire.
Austin LeeHOST
The mouth must be stuffed with clay before the coffin is closed.
Greg WilliamsGUEST
So we used to have that.
Greg WilliamsGUEST
We called it Funk and Wagnalls, and we would sit down and we'd open the page to N, and we would go down and we'd look up the answer.
Greg WilliamsGUEST
So all it is is doing it faster.
Greg WilliamsGUEST
When, when we talk about the thinking, that's where I take umbrage, because it's not really-
Rob CarterGUEST
I read extensively.
Rob CarterGUEST
Even at 12, 11, 12, 11, 12 years old, I had a set of encyclopedias, um, for Funk & Wagnalls.
Rob CarterGUEST
And I remember reading and I found an article, a Time magazine article about Paul Robeson.
Rob CarterGUEST
My grandmother had these Time magazines that were gifted to her.