Designing with words

There's a word for it:

wordle / wêrd-êl / noun

1. A creative design composed of words; an artistically arranged word cloud.  
2. (also spelled wortle) One of several pivoted pieces forming the throat of an adjustable die used in extruding wire and pipe.

Dr. Goodword: Wordle has been loitering in the English vocabulary since the 15th century in the second meaning above but has been reactivated in the first meaning as a result of the appearance of word inside it. Its recent resurrection in the realm of graphic arts looks good, since -le is a fairly common suffix in English.

So far wordle has not broken free of the world of graphic arts. However, I can see metaphoric uses for it, should it eventually escape the graphic arts: "Rather than saying a few words, I would say Reginald babbled in wordles, words arranged more for their beauty than for clarity."

History: The original wordle, which may have been better spelled wortle, lies in a fog of mystery; no one knows where it comes from. The resurrected wordle, however, seems to be a recent derivation from word + -le. The ancestry of word leads all over the Indo-European landscape. It emerged as verbum "word" in Latin and as rhetor "speaker" in Greek.

Lithuanian vardas "name", Sanskrit vrata "command", and a host of Germanic words like German Wort and Swedish ord are all related. The suffix -le is no longer active in English but historically it has marked instruments, as in treadle and candle and diminutives as in puddle (a little pool) and sparkle, a little spark. The -le in the revived version of wordle is neither of these but then it is a real suffix that makes this word legitimate.