Wonderful World of Words
November 13 – 15, 2026
Wonderful World of Words
A wonderful weekend for all those who love language, puzzles, and games! Founded in 1982 by the wonderful Gloria Rosenthal and her husband Larry, now one of Mohonk’s longest-running theme weekends, Wonderful World of Words invites you to explore wit, wisdom, and wordplay with some of our finest linguists, lexicographers, and language-lovers!
Sharpen your pencils, limber up your brain, and match wits with some of the best minds of our age!
How to Participate:
When making your reservation, please let us know you are interested in attending the Wonderful World of Words.
What’s Included
Your stay at Mohonk Mountain House includes access to countless activities and experiences for guest of all ages, including our indoor pool, tennis courts, show gardens, and an award-winning spa. Discover all that Mohonk has to offer during your mountaintop getaway.
Entertainment
Themed Mohonk Signature Events, featuring live music and engaging performances, changing daily
Schedule of Events
Program Leaders
Greg Pliska
A composer and orchestrator, Greg Pliska has been solving and creating puzzles since he could read. He is Chief Puzzle Officer for Hello Puzzlers!, with AJ Jacobs (the podcast formerly known as The Puzzler), now in its third season. He has been a puzzle writer and presenter for public radio’s Ask Me Another and A Way with Words, as well as a regular contributor to the MIT Mystery Hunt. Under the auspices of his company, Exaltation of Larks, he creates puzzle hunts for Web3 clients, universities, and others, and helped create this year’s mega-puzzle hunt, Midnight Madness. In his other career, Greg has scored films, television shows, musicals, and opera, and his orchestrations can be heard every morning on NPR and at night on CBS Evening News. Most recently, he produced and arranged the album LIVES OF THE ARTISTS, by Jonathan Levi and Mel Marvin, available everywhere.
Will Shortz
Will Shortz is the crossword editor of The New York Times, the puzzlemaster for NPR’s Weekend Edition, and the founder/director of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. He directed ‘Words’ from 2007 until 2019 and holds the distinction of being the only person to have attended every ‘Words’ weekend since its inception in 1982. In August, Will married for the first time to a partner he met through table tennis, which both play every day. Will will challenge anyone to a game of ping-pong in Mohonk’s Game Room on Saturday afternoon during ‘Words’ weekend!
Eric Berlin
Eric Berlin has had dozens of crosswords and other puzzles published in The New York Times, and he is the author of “The Puzzling World of Winston Breen,” a trilogy of puzzle-filled mysteries for kids. He creates live puzzle events for schools, museums, and organizations — among other places, his work has been seen at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, New York City’s Museum of Mathematics, and the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Eric is the constructor behind Puzzlesnacks (http://www.puzzlesnacks.com), and collections of his puzzles can be found on Amazon.
Jess Zafarris
Jess Zafarris is the author of several books on word origins, including Once Upon a Word (Rockridge Press, 2020), Words from Hell (Chambers, 2023), Useless Etymology (Chambers, 2025), and Into the Words (Chambers, 2026). She has also authored and co-authored several works on general fun facts and tabletop gaming, and she served as a guest editor and contributor for the word game The League of the Lexicon. She is a longtime video content creator who has built a devoted social media following on TikTok and Instagram, and she co-hosts the popular YouTube podcast Words Unravelled with Rob Watts, a.k.a. RobWords. She has been a featured speaker, panelist, and emcee at events including SXSW EDU, the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference, and Rising Phoenix, and she teaches writing- and author-centric courses for a range of universities and online platforms. Her blog, UselessEtymology.com, has been educating curious word lovers for more than a decade. She has served as a content and audience director at media brands including Adweek, Writer’s Digest, PRINT magazine, and Ragan Communications; she still ghostwrites for ad agency executives and produces events about social media and content strategy. She and her work have been quoted, featured, and mentioned in The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Reader’s Digest, and Harper’s Magazine, and she has appeared on BBC World Service Radio, NPR, and Boston Public Radio.
Matthew Broussard
Matthew Broussard is a stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and disgraced financial analyst. He has performed on Conan, the Tonight Show, and Comedy Central and appeared in The League, The Mindy Project, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Born to a Jewish biologist and Cajun chemist, Matthew earned a degree in computational math he always manages to bring up (just did it!) He is the author of the webcomic Monday Punday, a cartoon word game featured in the Cal Tech and Duke student newspapers. He currently resides in Brooklyn with his wife Laura, a pro swimmer turned comedian, and his cat Password, currently unemployed.
Kelly Wright
Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright (She/Her) is an experimental sociolinguist, lexicographer, and scholar-activist. She identifies as a working class Black Biracial cis Queer woman, an Afrolachian raised in Knoxville, Tennessee. She conducts interdisciplinary, policy-driven research which directly combats linguistic barriers to access and more covert constraints on an individual’s realization of their self-expression. She is dedicated to the documentation of everyday language user’s ideas about language use. Dr. Wright is also an accomplished lexicographer, working to bring new words into the dictionary alongside terminology from communities traditionally underrepresented in reference works.
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