Andrew Clements

Frindle FAQ's

Q: How long did it take to write?

A: If you took a look at the other books I had written before Frindle , you'd see they were all picture books. So when I got the idea for Frindle , I tried to write that story as picture book, too. And I did it. It was only three pages long, and it was called Nick’s New Word . In just three pages I told the entire story.

And during the next six months as I sent the three page picture book story to five different editors at five different publishing companies, they all told me basically the same thing: “It needs to be longer, don’t you think? It would be so much better as a chapter book.”

Well, after hearing that again and again, I finally got the message, and I wrote the manuscript for the novel. It took about four months of steady work to write, and I ended up with the longest manuscript I had ever written. And when I finished and read through it, I thought it was pretty good—remember, Frindle was my very first chapter book, so I didn't have a lot of experience to draw upon.

So I began sending the manuscript—that's the stack of paper before it gets made into a book—to editors at different publishing companies. Four different editors said "No thanks." Then one person, an editor named Stephanie Owens-Lurie, said yes. And I thought, "Hurrah! I'm done! I've written a chapter book!" Wrong. I had to go through at least five more months of rewriting—but gratefully, I had so much good advice and guidance from my wonderful editor.

And finally, we got the story just right.

Here are some documents showing the early stages of Frindle:

The Word Warriors
This document is dated June 6, 1993—the first time I tried to get the story idea written down.This document is dated June 6, 1993—the first time I tried to get the story idea written down.

A short chapter book called The Word Warriors about a group of girls who set about to make a new word. Perhaps starting with a dictionary definition. The word is frindle, and the definition is for a pen, and at the end

The year is 2010, a boy finds the word pen (arch.) See frindle.
he chewed on the end of his frindle, looking up another word flips to frindle, finds
“attributed to Judith Stamson, ca 1994”

The next chapter is in an Ohio junior high school and Judy starts a word.
the dictionary as time machine.

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Nick's New Word
Half a year later on January 4, 1994, I wrote this picture book text that's mentioned above.

Nick was good at wondering,
and one day he wondered where all the words in the dictionary came from.
So he asked Mrs. Granger, his Engish teacher.
And she said, “People made them up.
When people need new words,
they make up new ones or put pieces of old words together new ways.
Then if enough people use a new word long enough,
it ends up in the dictionary.”

That answer got Nick thinking, which is different from wondering.
Whenever Nick stopped wondering and started thinking,
things happened.

The next afternoon Nick walked into the Penny Pantry
and asked the lady behind the counter for a frindle.
Frindle was Nick’s new word.
She squinted at him. “A what?”
“A frindle, please. A black one.”
She leaned over closer and tilted one ear toward him. “You want what?”
“A frindle,” and this time Nick pointed at the ballpoint pens behind her on the shelf.
“A black one, please.”
She handed Nick the pen,
he handed her the 49¢, said, “Thank you,” and left the store.

Six days later Jake stood at the counter of the Penny Pantry.
He was the fifth kid that Nick had sent there to ask for a frindle.
And when he did, the lady reached right for the pens, and asked, “Blue or black?”

Nick was standing one aisle away at the candy racks, and he was grinning.
Frindle was a real word. His plan would work.

Jake, John, Dave, Chris, and Travis.
Five kids, five secret agents.
Nick made them all swear the oath.
From this day on and forever,
I will never use the word PEN again.
Instead, I will use the word FRINDLE,
and I will do everything possible so others will too.
And each boy signed the oath with Nick’s frindle.
The rest, of course, is history.
Here’s what happened.

School was the next battleground, and the first skirmish went like this.
Nick raised his hand during English class and said, “Mrs. Granger, I forgot my frindle.”
Then John, sitting three rows away, blurted out, “I have an extra one you can borrow.”
Then John made a big show of rooting through his backpack looking for something.
“I think I have an extra one, I mean, I told my mom to get me three or four. I’m sure I had an extra one in here yesterday, but I must have taken it...Wait, ...yeah, here it is.”
And then John made a big show of throwing it over to Nick,
and NIck missed it on purpose, and then make a big show of finding it.
They nearly had to stay after school for making such a scene,
but Mrs. Granger and every kid in the class got the message loud and clear.
That black plastic thing that Nick borrowed from John had a funny name...
a different name...a new name—Frindle.

Some of the teachers tried to fight it,
but kids talk more than teachers,
and they liked Nick’s new word.
A lot.

On the day of the class picture,
Nick and his secret agents whispered something into everyone’s ear.
And when the photographer said, “Say ‘CHEEESE!’”, no one did.
Every kid said “FRINDLE!” instead, and held one up so the camera could see it.
In just one month,
every kid at Lincoln Elementary School was writing with a frindle.

But not Mrs. Granger.
She made an announcement, and posted a notice.
Anyone who calls a pen a frindle
will stay after school and write this sentence 100 times:
“I am writing this punishment with a pen.”
But that just made everyone want to use Nick’s new word even more.
Staying after school with “The Lone Granger” became a badge of honor.

One day Nick and every kid in the fifth grade
asked Mrs. Granger if she had an extra frindle.
And almost 70 kids stayed after school.
They filled her room and spilled out into the hallway.
The principal had to stay after school to help Mrs. Granger,
and they had to arrange a special bus to get all the kids home.

And the next day, all the fifth graders did it again,
and so did half of the kids in the rest of the school,
over a hundred and fifty kids.
Parents called to complain,
and then the School Board got involved.

And then there was a story about Nick’s new word in the local papers.
And when the reporter talked to Mrs. Granger,
she said, “I give up. I tried to fight it,
but a word is hard thing to stop.

Once it was written about in the paper,
all the kids at the junior high
and all the kids at the high school started using Nick’s new word.
Then all the stores in town
started advertising frindles.

Finally a TV reporter heard about Nick’s new word and interviewed him.
And millions of kids heard about Nick’s new word.
And they liked it.

Like I said, the rest is history.
And one day, when Nick was 35 years old,
he bought a new dictionary.
And he opened it up to page 541,
and right before the word fringe he read this:
frin•dle (frin‘ dl). n. 1. an implement used to make permanent marks on a writing material. (arbitrary coinage by Nicholas Rogers) see pen

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And Now it's Called a Frindle
Less than two weeks later on January 13, 1994, I made another run at the idea. This time, I went at it from the future, and I was treating it like a detective story.

What you are about to read can all be found in my full report to the Dictionary Standards Board.
And please remember. I don’t make this stuff up. I just report the facts.

On March 23, 2035, the monthly updated Digital Dictionary of the English Language —the DDEL— was ready to roll down the informataion highway into the computer retreival systems of every school, home, university, business, and library in the known universe. I was in my office module at home when something triggered the automatic vari-sensor, and this message blinked on my datascreen:
New Word Alert.

The word was frindle. Here’s the entry that set off the alarm.

frin•dle (frin‘ dl). n. 1. an implement used to make permanent marks on a writing material. (origin unknown) see pen.

And when I keyed in the word pen, this came up.

pen (pên). n. archaic 1. a frindle (see).

I could hardly breathe, almost in shock. You see, pen is one of those solid words that folks in the dictionary business learn to count on. It goes back a thousand years to late Latin. It has a wonderfully clear and traceable ancestry and family tree. It’s just a darn good word. Pen archaic? Pushed out of common usage by frindle? How?!
I suspected foul play. Perhaps it was a hoax, a vicious, nasty trick by some clever computer hacker, some hater of culture and standards, some disgusting revisionist.
Origin unknown? Not for long, pal. Dave Allen, certified lexicographer, was on the case.

Test number 1
As I walked across the courtyard from my home to the shopping mall, I tried to remember the last time I bought a pen. I couldn’t. I could remember using one to sign my name when I bought my house six years ago, but like everyone else I know, I use my keyboard for writing, and my datacorder for note taking. It had been at least 10 years since I had really needed a pen for regular use.
So I walked into a shopping module at the Unimall, and asked for one.
The clerk looked up from his Toonscreen, and gave me a blank look. “Whah?”
“A PEN,” I said, very clearly, with emphasis on the P and the N. It’s a hard word to mess up. The clerk continued to squint and tilt his head at me, as I said it three or four more times. So finally I pointed to the plastic tub of ballpoints behind him, and said, “One of those.”
“Oh. Frindle. Why dincha say?”
The kid held up the CashVoicer, I said, “Dave Allen. Seventy-eight cents,”
the Voicer replied “Approved,” and I left holding onto my new frindle.
So frindle wasn’t a hoax. But it still deserved a full investigation—and it was going to get it.

Test Number 2
My next stop was the Audit Center. Since 1990 the EDDL team has tracked word usage electronically. When a new word is used in any of 16,000 different newspapers, magazines, newsletters, radio, or TV programs, or if a word is used on any of the fax systems or information retrievers on the National Communications Network, the use is captured, dated, the origin is noted—sometimes a person’s name, sometime a company name, sometimes just the name of a town or state. And all this information goes into a huge data base in a supercomputer at the Audit Center. It monitors the use of new words, and lets a human know when a word has gotten to a point in usage where it deserves its own entry in the dictionary. That’s what had caused the New Word Alert to flash on my screen.

At home again in my office module, I sat at my workstation in the, entered my password to access the computer at the Audit Center, and ran a search.
Subject: frindle.

There was a delay of almost 2 seconds. Very unusual.
It meant that there was a huge file on this word. It came up and flashed about 200 screenfuls of data at me. I flipped back to the very first entry. Bingo.

3/9/96 1420 fax - Union Pen Cor Bos MA to Sch Dis 1, Lewiston, ME. ref: 4 grs impr frindles, Lincoln El Sch

The jumble of letters and numbers on my screen meant this: One afternoon in March of 1996, someone at Union Pen Corporation did not understand when an order came in for four big boxes of imprinted frindles. They sent a fax back to Lewiston to ask for clarification, and the WordScan system caught the new word as the fax flew through the National Network.
Clarification. Yes, that was the right word. By 10:30 the next morning I was in Lewiston.

Witness Number One
Thomas Altman had been principal of Lincoln School in 1996. Retired now and living on a farm three miles out of town, Mr. Altman was very helpful.
“Oh yes, frindle. It was quite a battle there for a while. It was the kids, you know. They just started calling pens frindles. We tried to put a stop to it, but kids talk a lot more than teachers do, and it wasn’t long before we just gave up. Darndest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some doozies! Started in 1992 or 1993. That fax you mentioned from the pen company, that was in 1996. By then, the whole town was using frindles, and half the state knew what it meant. You take 260 kids in a school, and then you add up all the people and family they talk to, and then all the people they talk to— it just keeps going.”
Mr. Altman had it exactly right. “Yes,” I said, “in my business, we call it dispersion—the way a word spreads. The pen supply company was Boston, and the word hadn’t hit them yet. And when they sent the fax back to ask what it meant, the monitoring system spotted the word being used for the first time.” I paused, then asked, “Mr. Altman, are there any other teachers living in this area from those days who might be able to shed more light on this for me?”
Without any hesitation he said, “Alison Granger lives in town with her daughter and her family. When this thing started up, she was the teacher who led the loyal opposition. And her daughter, Jenny, she was there at the school in fifth grade the year it all started. You should be ready to get an earful.”
He punched the name into the keypad on the phone, and the address and phone number appeared instantly on the display screen.
“Mr. Altman, you’ve been a big help. I’ll let you know what I find out.” We shook hands, and he showed me to the door. As I loaded the address into the navigator unit on my dashboard, I felt pretty good. There was a trail, and I was on it.

Witness pro, Witness con
Mrs. Granger met me at the door. She did not look like a person who had retired 20 years ago. Her eyes were bright, peircing, and her handshake was strong. As she looked me over, I felt like I was about to get a homework assignment, or perhaps be sent to Mr. Altman’s office. Once a teacher, always a teacher.
“Mr. Allen, I am so glad you called. Someone really should get to the bottom of this. It has been bothering me now for almost 40 years, and I still don’t know what to make of it. Why, it only seems like yesterday that I heard that word for the first time.
“Can you recall anything about that first time? Any details?”
“Of course I can,” she snapped. “It was a fifth grade class, and I had about 18 boys and 6 girls. Big trouble. The boys weren’t bad, just squirrely and very smart. And no matter how I arranged the seats, there were never enough girls to really break up the silly stuff they were always trying to do. I had just begun a class when Jake Atkinson raised his hand and said, sweet as could be, ‘Mrs. Granger, I forgot my frindle.’ And before I could say a thing, his friend, John Rappell, pipes up right out loud and says, ‘I have an extra one you can borrow.’ Then that rascal John made a big show of rooting through his backpack looking for something until everyone in the class was watching. Then he pulled out a pen, and made another big show of tossing it to Jake three rows away. Jake missed the throw, and made another big show of crawling around on the floor to find it.”
I interrupted. “So you think they were acting this out?”
She looked at me and raised one eyebrow. “Mr. Allen, no student has ever fooled me about anything. Those two boys knew exactly what they were doing.” I believed her.
There was an awkward silence while I thought about this, and while she decided whether or not I was just another little troublemaker. Luckily, her daughter, Jenny, arrived home from work with her three-year-old son.
“Jennifer,” said Mrs Granger, “Meet Mr. Allen. He’s come to investigate about that phony word for pen that you and your friends started using.”
Jenny smiled at me, and then said to her mother with her eyes open wide and just a trace of humor in her voice, “Pen? Pen? what does that mean? Oh, yes...I remember, frindle.” Her mother was not amused. Jenny, on the other hand, seemed very amused, and I could see that these two had discussed this many times. Jenny used a frindle, and her mother still wrote with a pen.
Mrs. Granger stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Allen, I think I shall make us all some woogla. Would you like some?”
I was confused. “Woogla? Well, ...ssure. Whatever you’re having.”
Mrs.Granger smiled sweetly at me and then made a little face at Jenny as she said, “Oh. You probably don’t know that my grandson and I have made up a new word for tea. We call it woogla now. Aren’t we cute??” Sarcasm in people over 70 is not a pretty sight. “Come along Samuel,” she said to Jenny’s little boy. She took him by the hand. “Come with Grandma to kitchen and we shall make some woogla for the nice man.” She swept little Samuel off to the kitchen, and then there was a lot of rattling china and banging of the teakettle from out there.
Her daughter said, “Please don’t mind Mom. She still can’t stand it that all her students and every other kid in the school defied her. When everyone started using the new word, she was furious. She thought it was disrespectful or something. But for us, it was just a fad, something different—something of our own. It turned into a big power struggle. Mrs. Granger announced that anyone who called a pen a frindle would have to stay after school and write “I am writing this punishment with a pen.”a hundred times. But that just made everyone want to use the word even more, and staying after school with “The Lone Granger” got to be a badge of honor. One day every kid in the fifth grade asked her if she had an extra frindle. And every kid stayed after school. We filled her room and spilled out into the hallway. The principal had to stay after school to help her keep everyone under control, and they had to arrange a special bus to get all the kids home. There were more than 70 of us. And the next day, we all did it again, and so did half of the kids in the rest of the school, over a hundred and fifty kids. Parents were calling to complain, and then the school board got involved. And then it made the local papers, and that’s when Mom finally gave up. By trying to fight it, she had only made it more popular than ever. Once it was written about in the paper, it jumped to the junior high and the high school almost overnight. It was very exciting in a secret kind of way. Then all the stores that sell school supplies to kids started advertising frindles instead of pens, and the rest is history. And to this day, Mom still gets mad about it. It was pretty tough for me for a while. Mom was sure I knew all about it. She thought I was in on starting it.”
“And were you?” I asked, trying not to sound too eager.
“No, but I wish I had been.”
“Do you have any idea who might have started it?”
She looked at me suspiciously. “Why do you want to know all this? Are you trying to turn this around too? Like my mother?”
That stopped me in my tracks. “Well, I guess t;hat’s how I felt yesterday. You see, I work for the agency that publishes the dictionary. And yesterday was the first time I ever heard of the word frindle. It was just a shock, I guess. And at first, I did kind of feel angry, sort of like your mom. But really, now I just want to know the facts. I’d like to be able to know exactly how this happened. There are not many words in any language that can be traced to a single source. I just want to know the truth.”
It was a good speech, a true speech, and Jenny smiled. “It’s really is pretty amazing, isn’t it. You and I were probably in grade school at about the same time. I’ve been using a frindle for almost 40 years, and you grew up and started working on the dictionary, and until yesterday, you didn’t know a thing about my favorite word.” She paused, as if making a decision. Then she said, “As near as I can remember, there were three boys and two girls who really started this thing.”
“Jake and John?” I asked. “Your mother remembered an incident in her class.”
She nodded, “And Nick and Andrea and Jean. Whenever there was a stir about that word, one of those kids was always in the middle of it.
“Do you remember any last names? Your mother already gave me John’s and Jake’s.”
“Yes. Nick Sheldon, Andrea James, and Jean Mehaffey. Together those five could have figured out how to do anything. Lots of smarts.”
“Do you have any class pictures? I know this is pushing it, but any little clue could be helpful.”
“You’ll have to ask my mom. She’s the packrat. Teachers save everything. I’m a thrower, she’s a saver.”

The Plotters
Tea—or woogla—arrived. Mrs. Granger seemed in a better mood. She smiled at me and patted her daughter’s shoulder after putting down the tray. “I know I shouldn’t let this bother me, and I know how silly it all is. And when I think of it all, I really do admire the cleverness and the courage of those little bandits. Such a lot of fuss! They really had me going, as I’m sure Jenny has told you.”
Jenny blushed, and I could see there was plenty of real love between these two. “Jenny tells me that you may have a photo of the fifth graders from 1992. I’d like to look at it, if that’s possible.”
“Jenny, you pour the tea, and Samuel, give Mr. Allen a cookie. I’ll just be a moment.” And she walked briskly up the stairs. Two minutes later she was seated beside me on the sofa with a file folder marked 1992. And she leafed through it to find two photographs.
“This is my homeroom, and this is Mr. Byrne’s class. We split the fifth grade. He taught science and combined social studies and reading, I taught English and math. It was an odd split, but it suited us. The kids split up into four groups, and we had them go back and forth. It was kind of like changing classes, and we hoped that it would get them ready for junior high.”
While she talked, I looked at the class pictures. And at the teachers. What a study in contrasts. Mrs. Granger’s class was lined up by height in front of a bulletin board that featured an exhibit on penmanship and the 12’s times table. Very precise. Very orderly. Very tight. Everyone stood at attention, no one blinked, no one made a face. And on the left, in a pale pleated dress, stood Mrs. Granger, looking almost exactly like the woman sitting next to me.
Mr. Byrne’s students were sprawled and spread around on a carpet in the back of a room that was a jumble of exhibits and displays and hanging artwork. Paper mache heads of the Presidents, DNA molecules, and a mobile that looked like it was made of car and motorcycle pistons hung above the group. The kids sat in clusters, relaxed, among friends. And in the middle, looking a little bleary eyed, sat Mr. Byrne. His dark hair was tousled, and he was wearing blue jeans, sneakers, and white hooded sweatshirt.
“And where are Andrea and Jean and Jake and Nick and John?” I asked. Mrs. Granger pointed to a group of kids clustered at one end of Mr. Byrne’s rug. Five kids, all together. All smiling. Pals.
I held the picture up closer to my face, looking at their faces. Jenny was right. Bright. Then I looked again. All five of them had struck the same little pose. Each looked straight at the camera. Each had one hand held below the chin, and each one had the same expression around the mouth. I got the picture right up close to my eyes, and squinted. And all at once I knew. In the fingers below the chin three boys and two girls each held a small object. And when the shutter clicked, they didn’t say “Cheeese.” They said “Frindle.”

A big reuniion at the end. A new pledge. A new oath. A presentation to the Lone Granger. A fancy Pen.

Afterword.. the year is 2070. Young Fred sat at his screen at EDEL New Word Alert. Pen. See Frindle. How could this happen? Frindle? replaced by an archaic word like Pen? H:e woudl have to get to the bottom of this.

“I think I have an extra one, I mean, I told my mom to get me three or four. I’m sure I had an extra one in here yesterday, but I must have taken it...Wait, ...yeah, here it is.”
And then John would make a big show of throwing it over to Jake,
and Jake would miss it on purpose, and then make a big show of finding it.
They nearly had to stay after school for making such a scene,
but Mrs. Granger and every kid in the class got the message loud and clear.
That black plastic thing that Jake borrowed from John had a funny name...
a different name...a new name—Frindle.

I got his name from a the district
finally tracks down Nick himself. Nick is now a systems engineer in the digital art department at BERM, the biggest entertainment software company on Earth. His job was to manage, catalog, and digitize all the artwork ever created so they could be displayed on the wide screen µZM system.

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Frindle Young Reader
Finally, on April 6, 1994, after the picture book version had been roundly rejected five times, I got the idea started as a chapter book.

Andrew Clements
Frindle 975 words

Nick
The way Nick saw it, Linclon Elementary School was pretty dull. It needed a good jolt once in a while, and Nick was just the guy to deliver it. Not that he was a troublemaker. Not Nick Allen. He was just...well, let’s just say that Nick had plenty of ideas, and he knew what to do with them. He felt it was his duty to make school more lively.
Like the time Nick decided to turn Miss Deaver’s room into a tropical island. What kid in the northern hemisphere isn’t ready for a little summer in February? So first he got everyone in his third grade classroom to make small palm trees out of green and brown construction paper and tape them onto the corner of each desk. The teacher thought that was cute.
Next day all the girls wore paper flowers in their hair and all the boys wore sunglasses. Miss Deaver had only been a teacher for about six months, so she was delighted—“So creative!” The next day Nick turned the thermostat up to about 85 degreeswith a little screwdriver he had brought from home, and everyone in the class wore shorts and and tee shirts and no shoes. And when Miss Deaver left the room for a minute, Nick spread about ten cups of fine white sand all over the classroom floor. Miss Deaver was surprised again at just how creative her students could be.
But the sand got tracked out into the hallway where Manny the custodian did not think it was creative at all, and he stomped right down to the office.
The principal followed the trail of sand, and when he arrived Miss Deaver was teaching the hula to a group of girls near the front of the room, and Nick was just spiking a Nerf volleyball over a net made from six tee shirts tied together. The third grade trip to the South Seas ended. Suddenly.
About a year later in the middle of fourth grade Nick learned on a TV show that redwing blackbirds give this high-pitched chirp when a hawk or some other danger comes near. Because of the way sound travels, the hunter birds can’t tell where the high pitched chirp is coming from.
The next day during silent reading, Nick observed that his Mrs. Avery’s nose was curved kind of like the beak of a hawk. So he let out with a high, squeaky “Peep!” Mrs. Avery looked around in confusion, and said “Shhh!” to the class. A minute later Nick did it again. “Peeep!” There was a little giggling from the class. But Mrs. Avery pretended not hear the sound this time, and about 15 seconds later she slowly stood up and walked to the back of the classroom. Very sneaky.
Without taking his eyes off his book and without moving at all, Nick put his heart and soul into the highest and most annoying chirp of all: “Peeep!”
Mrs Avery pounced. “Janet Fisk, you stop that this instant!” Poor innocent Janet was sitting four rows away from Nick. She promptly burst into tears. Mrs. Avery knew she had made a mistake, and she apologized. “But someone is looking for big trouble,” said Mrs. Avery, looking more like a hawk every second.
Nick kept reading. At lunchtime he apologized to Janet and told her he was the one who had made the sound.
“You did?” said Janet. “How?”
So Nick showed her. And Janet’s chirps were even higher. She promised to keep it a secret.
All year long, at least once a week, Mrs. Avery heard a loud peep from somewhere in her fourth grade classroom—sometimes it was a high-pitched chirp, and sometimes it was a very high-pitched chirp. Mrs. Avery never figured out who was making that sound, and gradually she trained herself to ignore it. And for Nick, well, it was just a long science experiment—a very successful one.
And Janet Fisk enjoyed it too.
Mrs. Granger
To get into the middle school in the town of Westfield, you had to get out of Lincoln Elementary School, and to get out of Lincoln Elementary School, you had to get past Mrs. Granger. There were about 150 kids in fifth grade, three different teams of 50 kids each. And there were 7 fifth grade teachers: two math teachers, two science teachers, two social studies teachers, but only one language arts teacher. Mrs. Granger had a monopoly, and a reputation. All the kids knew that at the end of the line, fifth grade, Mrs. Granger would be the one grading their spelling tests and their reading tests, and worst of all, their vocabulary tests—week after week, month after month.
It seems like every language arts teacher in the world enjoys making kids use the dictionary— “Check your spelling. Check that definition. Check those syllable breaks.” But Mrs. Granger didn’t just enjoy the dictionary. She loved the dictionary—almost worshipped it. Her weekly vocabulary list was 35 words long, sometimes longer. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was a Word For The Day on the blackboard every morning, and when the end of the week rolled around, have pity on the poor fool who had not written each one down and looked each one up and learned each definition—because sooner or later Mrs. Granger would find out.
Her classroom had seven or eight different special dictionaries scattered around, plus there was a full set of 30 regular dictionaries on a shelf at the back of the room. But Mrs. Granger’s pride and joy was one of those huge unabridged dictionaries, the kind of book it takes two kids to carry. It sat on its own little table at the front of her classroom, sort of like a shrine. Every graduate of Lincoln Elementary School for the past 25 years can remember standing at that little table listening to Mrs. Granger’s battle cry: “Look it up! That’s why we have the dictionary.”
Even before the school year started, when it was still summer, Mrs. Granger was already busy. Every parent of every new fifth grader got a letter from her. Nick’s mom read part of it out loud during dinner one night. “...Every home is expected to have a good dictionary in it so each student can do his or her homework properly. Good spelling and good grammar and good word skills are essential for every student. Clear thinking requires a command of the English language, and fifth grade is the ideal time for every student to acquire an expanded vocabulary.” And then there was a list of the dictionaries that Mrs. Granger thought would be “...acceptable for home study.”
Mrs. Allen said, “It’s so nice to have a teacher who takes her work so seriously.”
Nick groaned. Nick had no particular use for the dictionary. He liked words a lot, and he was good at using them. But he figured that he got all the words he needed just by reading, and he read all the time. When he ran into a word he didn’t know, he asked his brother or his dad or whoever was handy what it meant, and if they knew, they’d tell him. But not Mrs. Granger: He could already her voice: “Look it up! That’s why we have the dictionary, young man.”
It was still a week before school and Nick already felt like fifth grade was going to be a very long year.

Round One
The first day of school was always just a get-acquainted day. Books got passed out, a lot of chatter, a lot of “What did YOU do over the summer?” Periods one through six went by very smoothly.
But Mrs. Granger’s class was all business. The first thing they did was take a vocabulary pre-test to see how many of the 35 words for the week the kids already knew. Tremble, circular, orchestra, —the list went on and on. Nick knew most of them. Then there was a handout about class procedures, then a review paper about cursive writing, and then a sample sheet showing how the heading should look on every assignment. No letup for 37 minutes straight.
Nick was a master of the delaying question, the teacher-stopper, the guaranteed timewaster. At three minutes before the bell, in that split second between the end of today’s classwork and the announcement of tomorrow’s homework, Nick could launch a question—he thought of them as mental grenades—guaranteed to sidetrack the teacher long enough to wipe out or delay the homework assignment. Timing was everything. Questions about current events, questions about the college the teacher went to, questions about the teacher’s favorite book or sport or hobby—Nick had been very successful with this tactic in the past.
And here he was in fifth grade, near the end of his very first language arts class with Mrs. Granger, and he could feel a homework assignment coming the way a farmer can feel a rainstorm.
Mrs. Granger paused to catch her breath, and Nick’s hand shot up. She glanced down at her seating chart.
“Yes, Nicholas?”
“Mrs. Granger, you have so many dictionaries, and that huge one especially...where did all those words come from? Did they just get copied from other dictionaries? It sure is a big book.”
Several kids smiled, and a few peeked at the clock. Nick was famous for this, and the whole class knew what he was doing. Including Mrs.Granger. She hesitated a moment, and gave Nick a smile that was just a little too sweet to be real.
“Why, what an interesting question. I could talk about that for hours, I bet.” She glanced around the classroom. “Do the rest of you want to know, too?” There was a lot of eager nodding. “Very well then. Nick, will you do some research on that subject and give a little oral report to the class? If you find out the answer yourself, it will mean so much more than if I just told you. Please have that ready for our next class.” She smiled at him again. Very sweetly. She continued, “Now, the homework for tomorrow can be found on page 8 of your Words Alive book....”
Nick felt the tops of his ears glowing red. A complete shutdown. An extra assigment. And probably a little black mark next to his name on the seating chart. Everything he had heard about this woman was true—don’t mess around with The Lone Granger.

Research
Nick
Of course it was a beautiful September afternoon, bright sun, cool breeze, blue sky. But not for Nick. Nick had to do a little report for the next day, plus copy out all the definitions for 35 words. This was not the way school was supposed to work. He did the definitions first, using the brand new red dictionary that his mom had bought because Mrs. Granger told her to.
Then he turned to the front of the dictionary and saw that there was an introduction to the book called “Words and Their Origins.” Perfect. One stop shopping. Here was all he needed to do his report. It would all be over in a few minutes. Nick could already feel the sun on his face and feel the breeze as he ran outside to play, homework all done. Then he read the first two sentences.:
Without question a modern American dictionary is one of the most surprisingly complex and profound documents ever to be created, for it embodies unparalelled etymological detail, reflecting not only superb lexicographic scholarship, but also the dreams and speech and imaginative talents of millions of people over thousands of years. Every person who has ever spoken or written in English has had a hand in its making.
What? Nick scratched his head and read it again. Not much better. It was sort of like trying to read the ingredients on a shampoo bottle. But he struggled on, and gradually he pieced together some ideas.
Mom Dad Home Room.

Maybe Nick does a little research on the dictionary. Maybe he learns that there are two types of lexicographers. The ones who like to think of the dictionary as an authority, and those who like to think of it as a mirror that reflects usage.
Coinage. Making new words.
Nick’s dictionary. He makes his own.
This particular little revolution began in an unexpected way. M
Nick was good at wondering,
and one day he wondered where the words in the dictionary come from.
So he asked his teacher, Mrs. Granger.
And she said, “People make them up.
When people need new words,
they make up new ones or put pieces of old ones together new ways.
Then, if enough people use a new word long enough,
it ends up in the dictionary.”

That answer got Nick thinking, which is different from wondering.
And whenever Nick stopped wondering and started thinking,
things happened.

The next afternoon Nick walked into the Penny Pantry
and asked the lady behind the counter for a frindle.
Frindle was Nick’s new word.
She squinted at him. “A what?”
“A frindle, please. A black one.”
She leaned over closer and aimed one ear at him. “You want what?”
“A frindle,” and this time Nick pointed at the ballpoint pens behind her on the shelf.
“A black one, please.”
She handed Nick the pen,
he handed her the 49¢, said, “Thank you,” and left the store.

Seven days later Travis stood at the counter of the Penny Pantry.
He was the fifth kid that Nick had sent there to ask for a frindle.
And when he asked, the lady reached right for the pens and said, “Blue or black?”

Nick was standing one aisle away at the candy racks, and he was grinning.
Frindle was a real word. His plan would work.

John, Jake, Dave, Chris, and Travis.
Add Nick, and that’s six kids—six secret agents.
They all took an oath.
From this day on and forever,
I will never use the word PEN again.
Instead, I will use the word FRINDLE,
and I will do everything possible so others will too.
And all six of them signed the oath with Nick’s frindle.
The rest, of course, is history.

Clements • Frindle • 2

School was the perfect place to launch a new word,
and here’s how it all started.
Nick raised his hand during English class and said, “Mrs. Granger, I forgot my frindle.”
Sitting three rows away, John blurted out, “I have an extra one you can borrow.”
Then John made a big show of looking for something in his backpack.
“I think I have an extra one, I mean, I told my mom to get me three or four.
I’m sure I had an extra frindle in here yesterday, but I must have taken it...Wait, ...oh yeah, here it is.”
And then John made a big show of throwing it over to Nick,
and Nick missed it on purpose, and then he made a big show of finding it.
They nearly had to stay after school for clowning around,
but Mrs. Granger and every kid in the class got the message loud and clear.
That black plastic thing that Nick borrowed from John had a funny name...
a different name...a new name—frindle.

On the day of the 5th grade class picture,
Nick and his secret agents whispered something into everyone’s ear.
And when the photographer said, “Say ‘CHEEESE!’”, no one did.
Instead, every kid said “FRINDLE!,” and held one up for the camera.

When kids like a word, they say it all the time.
And the kids at Lincoln Elementary School liked Nick’s new word. A lot.
After just one month,
every student was writing with a frindle.
But not Mrs. Granger.
She made an announcement, and posted a notice.

Anyone who calls a pen a frindle
will stay after school and write this sentence 100 times:
“I am writing this punishment with a pen.”

But that just made everyone want to use Nick’s new word even more.
Staying after school with “The Lone Granger” became a badge of honor.

One day Nick and his friends convinced every kid in the fifth grade
to ask Mrs. Granger if she had an extra frindle.
“She can’t keep everyone after school, can she?”
Clements • Frindle • 3

Almost 70 kids stayed after school with Mrs. Granger that day.
They filled her room and spilled out into the hallway.
The principal had to stay late to help,
and they had to arrange a special bus to get all the kids home.

And the next day, all the fifth graders did it again,
and so did half of the kids in the rest of the school—
over a hundred and fifty kids.
Parents called to complain,
the school bus drivers threatened to go on strike,
and then the School Board got involved.

When the reporter from the local newspaper talked to Mrs. Granger,
she said, “Yes, I have tried my best to fight it.
Such a waste of time and thought!
Of course, it’s just a silly fad,
and when you add an e to fad, you get fade.
And I predict that this fad will fade.”

But after the story was printed in the newspaper,
all the kids at the junior high
and all the kids at the high school
started using the word, too.
And then all the stores in town stopped selling pens
and started selling frindles.

Finally, a TV reporter heard about Nick’s new word,
so there was a story about it on the Six O’clock News.
Then Nick was interviewed on a talk show.
Millions of kids heard about Nick’s new word,
and they started using it, too.

Like I said, the rest is history.
So don’t be surprised—
Some day you’ll open the dictionary
and right there between frim and fringe you’ll see this:

frin•dle (frin‘ dl). n. a device used to make marks with ink [arbitrary coinage; originated by Nicholas Allen (see pen)]

And how does Mrs. Granger feel about all this?
Well, she still writes with a pen.