Supreme Court justices are increasingly turning to dictionaries for semantic support when writing decisions, according to Adam Liptak of The New York Times. But Oxford English Dictionary editor at large Jesse Sheidlower says, "I think that it’s probably wrong, in almost all situations, to use a dictionary in the courtroom." Read the article here.

Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer is in Montreal for the Dictionary of Society of North America biennial conference. He checked in with the CBC Radio show "Q" to give a preview of his talk on how lexicographers trace hip-hop slang from its earliest roots. You can hear the interview here, starting at about one hour into the June 8th podcast.

It's time once again for the Scripps National Spelling Bee! The preliminaries are today, and the nationally televised semifinals and finals are tomorrow (June 2). Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer will be live-tweeting the competition tomorrow on the VT Twitter feed and reporting on the results here in his Word Routes column. In the meantime, read Ben's observations on tricky spelling here and here, and try the super-addictive Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee!

On his site Wordorigins.org, David Wilton has started a series of posts on "words first used in English for a particular year," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In his first post, he begins with the year 1911. Did you know that air force, floozy, lettergram, mozzarella, and taxi were all first documented a century ago? Read Wilton's post here.

University of Delaware English professor Ben Yagoda has noted an increased trend of Americans putting punctuation outside of quotation marks instead of inside of them. Yagoda tracks the rise of "logical punctuation" in his latest Slate article, here. And read Baltimore Sun copy editor John E. McIntyre's take here.

On her Fritinancy blog, Visual Thesaurus contributor Nancy Friedman examines some of the words and phrases that have emerged in the coverage of the killing of Osama bin Laden, including Abbottabad, double tap, triumphalism, and halo effect. Read her post here.

Stan Carey, one of our regular contributors, has a detailed post on his Sentence First blog about different from, than, and to. Though the than and to variants are often considered incorrect, Stan argues that these are simply dialectal differences. Read the whole thing here.