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.

If Mark Peters' review of the new book From Elvish to Klingon whets your appetite for constructed languages, be sure to check out the recent New York Times article on Dothraki, the language created for the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones. And also take a look at Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer's "On Language" column about the Na'vi language of Avatar, here.

Have you ever been misled by the spelling of a word into thinking that it's pronounced differently? Like, say, thinking that "misled" is pronounced like "mizzled"? Now you know what a "misle" is. On the Chronicle blog Lingua Franca, linguist Geoffrey Pullum investigates, inspired by a colleague's assumption that "biopic" rhymes with "myopic." Read Pullum's post here.

Today marks the 110th anniversary of the first known appearance of "Ms." as a marriage-neutral title for women. Read Ben Zimmer's account of discovering the original 1901 use in his Word Routes column here, with some further thoughts on the title's history here.

October 20 is the National Day on Writing, an annual celebration of all things writerly. You can take part in the festivities on Twitter by using the hashtag #whyIwrite. For more information see this post from Katherine Schulten of the New York Times Learning Network, one of the sponsors of this year's event.

National Dictionary Day takes place on October 16, the birth date of America's pioneering lexicographer Noah Webster. As you toast to Noah this year, check out this article by Joshua Kendall about Webster's role in the development of modern publishing. And stay tuned on Monday for an excerpt from Kendall's new biography of Webster, The Forgotten Founding Father.

Have you noticed how the word awesome once meant "awe-inspiring" or "extraordinarily good," but now just means, well, "good"? It's a case of semantic inflation, according to The Economist's Robert Lane Greene. Read his fascinating exploration of the word's plunge into mediocrity in Intelligent Life magazine here.