If your Saturday night needs some excitement, join us here in the Lounge for our weekly linguistic adventure: it's a thrill ride that you can enjoy without leaving the comfort of your recliner!

We've been thinking about the data cloud in the Lounge these days. "What data cloud?" you may ask, and well that you should: it's a term relatively new to English and it hasn't yet settled down to a single fixed meaning. The data cloud we've been thinking about is the Big One: the nebulous dataset consisting of all the data that is, in principle, at your fingertips when they are poised above an Internet-connected keyboard.

Do you feel called upon to justify the activity of reading the dictionary? Seek no further! This month we visit a poet who whiled away many hours with her eyes glued to the fine print, and ended up having quite a lot to show for it.

This month in the Lounge we examine a common cause of Language indigestion and show the way to lasting relief.

They say that breaking up is hard to do, but English words seem to have just as hard a time of it forming stable relationships. This month in the Lounge we examine recent trends.

"How do I get my word in the dictionary?" This is a question that lexicographers in the Lounge and elsewhere are asked more often than you might expect. While it might be unkind to characterize the sort of person who asks the question, we hope it will be instructive to describe how new words actually make their way into dictionaries. That, in turn, should reveal why there are probably many better things to do in life than getting one's word in the dictionary. By doing some of them, you might get your word in anyway.