How Many Ways Can You Spell Scissors?

How many ways are there to spell the word scissors? Even accounting for typical misspellings, we were hard-pressed to come up with more than four spelling variations. Fortunately, there is a better authority on the subject, who lists no fewer than 240 ways to spell the word.

Author T.T. Barrow of Enfield, England wrote “To the Curious.” Originally written in 1829 and published in an 1895 issue of The Picture Magazine, Barrow’s article claims that this word appears capable of more variations than any other in the English language. If noted that he could expand the list to 480 variations by substituting ‘z’ for ‘s.’

Barrow notes that he could come up with more than 480 variations, but refrained from listing them in the article. He wrote, “I am aware of many others but most of them are objectionable…”

Read “The Chaos” — the poem that deals with the utter insanity of the English language

Barrow’s standard of “objectionable” is rather nebulous, to say the least. Among his accepted spellings are such monstrosities as ciszures, seyzserz, and syzzyrs. We are rather curious about the variants that he found inappropriate for use.

Having thus dazzled his reading audience with a list of the different ways to spell this infinitely-flexible word, Barrow chose to wax eloquently about the philosophical implications of his findings. At least, that’s what we think he’s doing. In all honesty, we don’t have the foggiest notion of what point he is trying to drive home:

If any person should feel a longing desire to be an author; instead of lighting the fire of contention, and abusing his neighbours to his own detriment, let him try his hand at Scissars.

If engaged in writing for the amusement of the Public and cannot refrain from introducing subjects which may be prejudicial to the morals of the rising generation, had he not much better write nothing but Scissers.

Is he a Politician and desirous of instructing us in an incomparable method of paying off the National Debt, he may as well cut it short with Scissirs.

If he be studying to surprise the world with a fine spun string of nothings, intending to subvert the Christian Religion, I would advise him first to try Scissors.

If any other subject engage his attention, it will always be a very safe and adviseable plan to consider if at any future more serious moment he might not be inclined to wish he had written nothing but Scissurs.

UPDATE: Thanks to Armin Rose for providing us with this excerpt from The Leisure Hour, that explodes the premise of what we have written:

But the most remarkable instance of persistency in a useless labour, is one which we fell in with but the other day, in a pawnbroker’s window in Holborn. This was a volume in manuscript, handsomely bound and gilt, and written with extraordinary care and neatness, containing about four hundred pages of three columns each; it was without a single idea, and what is more, comprised but one word, which formed the whole of its contents. The mystery is explained by the title, which ran thus (if we recollect right) – “Thirty-three thousand five hundred and thirty-five ways of spelling the word scissors.” Imagine an author sitting down to the composition of such a work; imagine the dreary monotony of the task—the endless combinations of consonants and vowels—the numberless experiments that must have failed—and the everlasting examinations and re-examinations that were imperative in order to escape repititions. Yet here it was—done, and done thoroughly, and exquisitely copied out on fine paper, well bound, and offered for sale for three pounds. Three pounds! for the labour of tens of thousands of hours! – labour which, had it been employed upon the humblest kind of mechanical drudgery—say the splitting of lucifer matches—would have brought the author a hundred pounds at least. It was a luckless hour for him when he discovered the unlucky word which was capable of such a prodigious number of transformations, and by which he must have been hag-ridden through all that dreary drudgery. Perhaps there is no fact in the whole history of useless labour to match this.

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