Weekend Word Wrap: dittograms

David K. Israel
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In Jim Wegryn's book, A Barrel Full of Words: A Treasury of Wordplay in his chapter on homophones, he introduces a fun concept he calls dittograms. According to Jim, dittograms are words or phrases with repeated sounds. "The trick is to see how many dittograms you can get into one coherent sentence," he says.

For example, here are a few I liked from the book:

  • On breezy days Gale couldn't find stationary stationery for his novel novel.
  • A noise annoys the principle principal.
  • In the Vatican, a popery potpourri comes from sealing ceiling art.

I gave it a try and though I wasn't able to get two different sets of homophones in one sentence, I was able to score a homophone triplet.

She went to two tutu stores but they were all out of her size.

I had a lot of fun coming up with a few others, but they're a little dirty for this site. However, we'd love to read some of our pros' prose. If you think up some clean good ones, drop 'em in the comments.

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