

Sign up
Here's how it works:
  1. Anybody can ask a question
  2. Anybody can answer

Is curiouser, in fact, a word?

                                (Yes, this question is very short, but that’s really all I need to ask.)

share|improve this question





share|improve this answer
@PLL you get a +1 on that comment just for the "humourectomy" ;-) (Of course, I'd spell it "humorectomy"...) – Jürgen A. Erhard Feb 11 '11 at 9:18




share|improve this answer

Curiouser isn't the standard form of the expression in English; the equivalent standard form is more curious.

To elaborate, as a general rule the comparative -er and the superlative -est suffixes don't attach to adjectives of more than two syllables — the modifiers more and most are preferred pretty much exclusively — so even though a word like curiouser is readily understood, it sounds odd.

This may have been the original point of it. The OED addresses the phrase curiouser and curiouser within the entry for curious, citing as its origin Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865), which is a notoriously whimsical text. The OED doesn't treat the bare word curiouser as an expression unto itself; rather, it gives the meaning of the entire phrase curiouser and curiouser as "more and more curious; increasingly strange". Note that it defines the phrase with the standard form of expression more curious. But given the entry, you might be able to justify the use of the entire phrase in a formal context, depending on your audience, if not the bare word.

Of course curiouser is a word in the pure linguistic sense, however, and clearly it's a word with its own meaning even as it takes part in Alice's phrase. And the fact that it doesn't accord with standard English construction and usage doesn't at all stop everyone from using it. Indeed, along with the entire original phrase, it seems to have entered the collective discourse, if not especially frequently, and still retaining the some of the whimsicality of the original instance. Witness the following:

  • Mickey thought curiouser was a noun, something that made you more curious. That's what made up my mind about the title. Wouldn't it be great if people listened to this album and it made them curiouser?Kate Miller-Heidke
  • Benford’s Law: A curious statistical phenomenon that keeps getting curiouserTed Hill

The great thing about couriouser is its self-referential performativity. It's a strange word that means strange.

Even odder, though, is curiousest, which may help shed some light on the "problem" with couriouser. I would venture that couriousest, being the couriouser of the two words, is hardly ever used.

Note: Thanks to Kosmonaut for starting this answer off. I tried simply to make an edit to Kosmonaut's answer, but my edit was rejected as too different, so I posted the edited version as a separate answer. Since then I've revised it further.

share|improve this answer

It is because Lewis Caroll says it is:


share|improve this answer





share|improve this answer

I'm certainly not the smartest person on this board from what I've read so far, but 'Curiouser' sounds like it would fall quite nicely under the definition of NEOLOGISM, (i.e., a term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use but that has not yet been accepted into mainstream language...and is often directly attributable to a specific person, publication, period or event). But it could also be a SEMANTIC EXTENSION, which is basically an already existing word with a new twist. But really it comes down to IDIOLECT, your own personal dialect and vocabulary which you choose to use.

share|improve this answer
It is neither a neologism nor semantic extension, no. If anything, it's a somewhat unusual form of analogy (which is not surprising, given its humorous origin). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 17 '14 at 23:16

protected by tchrist Feb 22 '15 at 0:32


Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?
