PURPLEXING

Sometimes there are these hidden-in-plain-sight gems that I discover that just blow me away. In the PURPLEXING word zipper, there's something truly special on display. We start by mixing the words PURPLE and PLEXING together to form PURPLEXING, which functions like a normal word zipper, but if we separate that end word we get PURPLE XING. This is where things get really interesting. XING, which is an abbreviated way to say something is crossing, as in something crossing the street to get from one side to the other or the place where two roads meet. So when we add this new definition in, we get an autological commentary of what is happening in the word zipper itself; a self-defining attribute made up of the exact words that define itself. You really can't get any more meta than that. These types of wordplay aren't rare per se, but you definitely need to dig deep for them with the quantum foam of the English language.