Perhaps you've heard of Tebowing, the odd new trend of imitating the prayerful pose of Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow. On the Oxford University Press blog, Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters digs up many more eponyms drawn from the names of sports figures, from Bucknered to Plaxidentally. Read it here.

In his best-selling grammar book for teachers of English as a foreign language, Basic English Usage (1984), Michael Swan famously used the term "taboo words" to discuss words that we tend to skirt around in the classroom, and this term entered the EFL teachers lexicon from that point on.  Continue reading...

Fred R. Shapiro, the editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, is constantly on the lookout for new quotations that might make the cut for the next edition of his authoritative quotation dictionary. Below, find out what he thinks are the top ten quotations of 2011.  Continue reading...

The Visual Thesaurus has been nominated as one of the best websites about the English language, as part of Macmillan Dictionary's Love English Awards for 2011. Want to show your fandom for the VT? Vote here! And thanks for your support.

Death has been in the news lately, with the passing of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il and former Czech president Vaclav Havel within hours of each other. Despite the very different legacies of the two world leaders, most English-language news outlets used the same wording to describe their deaths: in obituaries, both Kim and Havel simply died. But English, like many other world languages, has a rich vocabulary of terms for dying, from the blunt to the euphemistic.  Continue reading...

Just in time for the holiday season, Merrill Perlman takes a look at the origins of some yuletide expressions.  Continue reading...

University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron is a regular Visual Thesaurus contributor, and we're proud to feature selected pieces he has written for his site, The Web of Language. Here, Dennis looks back on some of the top language stories that crossed his radar in 2011.  Continue reading...