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Latest blog posts

Who are these Christmas Characters?

With Christmas less than a week away, it’s time to celebrate here at Spellzone. Today we’re looking at two famous Christmas songs and some characters who feature in them. Where do these characters come from? Are they based on real people? How long have their stories been around for? You can read our article about Christmas characters from books here. In the meadow we can build a snowman… The Christmas song Winter Wonderland features the following two lines: ‘In the meadow we can build a snowman, and pretend that he is Parson Brown’. The Spellzone dictionary defines the word ‘parson’ as ‘a person authorized to conduct religious wo...

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What the Dickens?

Over the year, a few of our blog posts have mentioned words that derive from people or fictional characters: ‘quixotic’ from Don Quixote, ‘malapropism’ from Mrs Malaprop, ‘puckish’ from Puck, ‘July and August’ from Julius and Augustus Caesar, and many more. This week I thought I’d take a look at Charles Dickens, the famous nineteenth-century author, after whom the word ‘Dickensian’ was coined. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘Dickensian’ as an adjective used to describe something that is ‘reminiscent of the novels of Charles Dickens, especially in suggesting the poor social conditions or comically re...

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