spoonerism [E20th] A spoonerism is a verbal error in which you accidentally swap round the initial parts of two words, as in ‘Our queer old dean’ instead of ‘Our dear old queen’. The term comes from the name of the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), an Oxford academic who was reputedly prone to such slips of the tongue, although there is no hard evidence he said many of the things attributed to him. A classic made-up ‘spoonerism’ associated with him was ‘You have tasted your worm, you have hissed my mystery lectures, and you must leave by the first town drain’, supposedly said to an idle student.