The New York Times has a fascinating interactive graphic showing word usage in inaugural addresses from Washington to Obama. Check it out here.

What made Martin Luther King's oratorical style so powerful? Linguist Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania analyzes the phonetics behind the rhetoric here.

Do you have a special knack for picking up languages? Writer Michael Erard wants to hear from you. He's set up a website for his next book, Babel No More, about "language superlearners." Take his survey if you think you qualify as a hyperpolyglot!

This year marks the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Samuel Johnson, the great pioneer of English-language lexicography. To celebrate, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University has launched Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, which presents a word a day from Johnson's landmark Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Words are taken from the annotated proof copy of the first edition held at Beinecke, adorned with handwritten corrections by Johnson and his helpers. Some early selections follow below.  Continue reading...

Forvo is a new website where you can find a huge array of words pronounced in their original languages. Native speakers can upload their own pronunciations — it's "crowdsourcing" at its best.

The trans-Atlantic words of the year have been selected on the Separated by a Common Language blog. Best American-to-British import is meh, and the best British-to-American import is vet (the verb). Read all about it here (and read our own discussion of meh here and vet here).

From Three Percent, the blog of the University of Rochester publishing house Open House Books, comes word of a stupendous literary feat. The French writer Mathias Énard has published a 517-page novel entitled "Zone," and the whole thing (aside from a few pages of flashbacks) consists of a single 150,000-word sentence! Don't know French? No problem: Open House is publishing an English translation, due out in 2010.  Continue reading...