It's time once again to break out the holiday eggnog! Ever wonder where the word eggnog comes from? Wonder no more: check out the Word Routes column that Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer wrote last holiday season, "The Origins of 'Eggnog,' Holiday Grog."

Last week, an exciting new tool for analyzing the history of language and culture was unveiled by Google. They call it the "Ngram Viewer," and it's an interface to study the enormous corpus of historical texts scanned by Google Books. The Ngram Viewer was rolled out in conjunction with a paper in the journal Science introducing the field of "culturomics." Dennis Baron has weighed in on the significance of this development for researchers. But what about those peculiar words, culturomics and ngram?  Continue reading...

We are pleased to present another excerpt from the new anthology entitled, One Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe, published by Sarabande Books. The editor, Molly McQuade, asked 66 writers the question, "What one word means the most to you, and why?" Among the essays McQuade has collected is "Interesting," by Jayson Iwen.  Continue reading...

It's that time of year — to make New Year's resolutions and to toast to a stronger vocabulary (that's your resolution, right?) Well, to help your students fulfill their resolution of expanding their vocabularies in 2011, we are sending them a worksheet that will help them figure out what some words containing the Latin root nov all have in common.  Continue reading...

Once again award-winning writer and educator Bob Greenman takes us on a journey through words selected from More Words That Make a Difference, a delightful book illustrating word usage with passages from the Atlantic Monthly.  Continue reading...

People judge you by the words you use. This warning, once the slogan of a vocabulary building course, is now the mantra of the new science of culturomics.  Continue reading...

Theodore Geisel, the man we know as Dr. Seuss, would be happy to know that his books for children are ideally suited for the iPad. "The tablet delivers the active connection between words and images that Dr. Seuss always intended," L. Gordon Crovitz writes in the Wall Street Journal. Read about the success of "e-Seuss" here.