I heard a great joke the other day: "If you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, eventually one of them would write Hey Hey We're the Monkees!" I liked it so much that I used it on my website. It came back to me this morning as I was thinking about buzzwords. I mean, how do people come up with the jargon that gets stuffed into press releases and so on?  Continue reading...

This past week saw Barack Obama clinch the Democratic presidential nomination, with the commitments of undecided "superdelegates" putting him over the top. Even though the term superdelegate has been kicking around Democratic circles since 1981, the word has achieved new prominence this year, when all eyes were on these unpledged party leaders to break the primary deadlock between Obama and Hillary Clinton. We're less than halfway through 2008, but superdelegate has already emerged as a formidable candidate for Word of the Year.  Continue reading...

Want to hear the difference between English as spoken in Chicago and Liverpool, or Delhi and Alabama? The University of Edinburgh's Sound Comparisons lets you listen to a variety of English accents from around the Anglophone world. It's an eye-opening trip through the diversity of World English.

Stuck with your writing? Hitting a roadblock? Feeling you just can't go any further? Here is a game to help. It will sound a little crazy but, trust me, it works.  Continue reading...

Passionate about food and language? These online epicures have got your number.

Polyglot Vegetarian

New York City Food and Drink

The Food Timeline

Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages

A hearty congratulations from all of us here at the Visual Thesaurus to Sameer Mishra, winner of the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee! Sameer, a 13-year-old from West Lafayette, Indiana, triumphed over his competitors by correctly spelling a very fitting word in the final round: guerdon, meaning "reward or payment." His reward was $35,000 in cash and various other prizes. The second-place finisher, Sidharth Chand of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, performed admirably on words like introuvable ("impossible to find"), but he eventually erred in spelling prosopopoeia, a personifying figure of speech.  Continue reading...

In honor of this year's National Spelling Bee, here are some books relating to the culture of competitive spelling.

American Bee

How to Spell Like a Champ

The Spelling List And Word Study Resource Book

Webster's Third New International Dictionary (aka the Bee Bible)

...and The Big Book of Spelling Tests, by our own Orin Hargraves.