On Wired Science, Brandom Keim has coined a new word: astrobioethics, "a branch of ethics involving the implications of life science in space." He's hoping his neologism will make it into the dictionaries some day.

Last week in part one of our interview with Oxford English Dictionary editor at large Jesse Sheidlower, we talked about the OED's century-and-a-half reliance on volunteer readers to help gather historical citations — a practice now trendily called "crowdsourcing." This week we delve into how the OED has adapted to the digital age through the creation of the online edition, which includes the entire text of the 20-volume print edition as well as all the newly revised material for the planned Third Edition. It's an unprecedented electronic undertaking, but some worry that it presages the end of the print OED.  Continue reading...

Doing research, scholarly or otherwise, increasingly requires acumen with online resources. Here are some books to help sharpen your Internet search skills.

Librarian's Guide to Online Searching

The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook

Mastering Online Research

Internet Research Skills

A little while back we reported on a Los Angeles Times reader complaining about difficult vocabulary words like contretemps and phantasmagoria appearing in the newspaper. Other L.A. Times readers (and our own commenters) vehemently disagreed, saying that newspapers should shun the old maxim, "Don't use big words." The New York Times Magazine clearly does not have a "No Big Words" policy, since Sunday's edition featured an article with a favorite word of the late logophile William F. Buckley, Jr.: eristic.  Continue reading...

Whether they're known as twilighters or twi-hards, fans of Stephenie Meyer's best-selling vampire novels can often be found obsessing online.

Twilight Lexicon

Twilighters.org

Twilight Source

Twilighters Anonymous

Writing a book is hard: just ask any author. But coming up with a title for your book? That's easy.

Honestly.

Oh, you've probably heard a different story, about how choosing a book title is the toughest part of the whole endeavor. But I'm going to share with you a six-word secret for skipping directly to a happy ending: Find a formula and copy it.  Continue reading...

Every learner of a foreign language experiences a certain euphoria at the beginning, based (we believe) mainly on fantasies about what you'll be able to do when the studied tongue is mastered. After a short time, this feeling is often crushed — or at least, dealt a serious blow — by a collision with a wall.  Continue reading...