We all know J.R.R. Tolkien from his epic The Lord of the Rings, voted best novel of the 20th century. But a lot of people don’t know that he was as word obsessed as you are! His first academic job, after coming back from the Great War, was at the Oxford English Dictionary (he wrote a part of the letter ‘W’ for the first edition). His great fantasy novels began with him inventing languages – the Elvish languages prominent in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He invented, for instance, languages he called ‘Quenya’ and ‘Sindarin’. Then he began telling stories to explain the history behind his invented languages. And Tolkien himself is now part of the dictionary that he once helped edit – since the OED now includes the word ‘hobbit’ with this definition: ‘In the tales of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973): one of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race, that gave themselves this name (meaning ‘hole-dweller’) but were called by others halflings, since they were half the height of normal men’. And the first quotation in the OED in support of that definition comes from The Hobbit (1937): ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’. Tolkien once said that when he first wrote those words (on the back of a student’s exam paper he was marking) he had no idea what a hobbit was, and what an adventure it would lead him on. But there is more. Another word coined by Tolkien is also found in the OED: ‘eucatastrophe’. This means ‘a sudden or unexpected favourable turn of events’. When things suddenly turn out badly that is a catastrophe, but when everything unexpectedly goes well and a happy conclusion is reached that is a ‘eucatastrophe’. Tolkien took the familiar word ‘catastrophe’ and turned its meaning around by adding the prefix ‘eu-’ at the front, from the Greek word for ‘good’. So, whenever you are finding yourself fascinated by words, remember Tolkien was there first!