The Visual Thesaurus will have an exhibit at the Annual Conference & Exposition of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. Visit us at Booth #2368! Click here for conference details.

The Fifth International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology will be held at St Anne's College, Oxford, UK, from June 16 to 18. Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer will be presenting a paper on slang lexicography. Click here for more details.

A Spanish educational ad campaign using what appears to be "bad English" has University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron thinking about the spread of international English beyond the Anglophone world.  Continue reading...

We rarely shine the spotlight on a single word in the Lounge but this month we have a special honoree: the noun patch. We've heard a couple of startling uses of patch recently and it got us thinking about what a great word it is, and how well it exemplifies the genius of language and the genius of English.  Continue reading...

As the massive oil disaster unfolds in the Gulf of Mexico, John Conway of the Cosmic Variance blog wonders what name we will eventually settle on for the environmental catastrophe. The "BP Deepwater Horizon Spill"? The "Transocean/BP Leak"? Read more here.