What's the difference between a podium and a lectern?  Continue reading...

It's time once again for the cream of the crosswording crop to converge on the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn, New York. Last year the nail-biting final round saw Tyler Hinman emerge victorious for the fifth consecutive year (his thrilling first win was captured in the documentary Wordplay). Will Tyler manage to pull off #6, or is it time for a new winner — like, say, last year's breakout star Dan Feyer?  Continue reading...

Over the last few days, America's Eastern seaboard has seen record levels of snow... accompanied by record levels of snow wordplay. There has been a blizzard of "portmanteau words" involving snow, with snowmageddon and snowpocalypse leading the way. On Twitter, the hashtag of choice has been snOMG, compactly joining snow with the online interjection OMG. We haven't seen this much seasonal word-blending since 2008's "summer of the staycation."  Continue reading...

After writing about "crash blossoms" in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, I've gotten plenty of responses from readers sending in their own favorite examples of unintentionally ambiguous headlines. I've also been hearing more about an anecdote I mentioned, relating to a legendary telegram long attributed to Cary Grant.  Continue reading...

My latest On Language column in the New York Times Magazine is all about "crash blossoms," a new term for a phenomenon that people have been noting for decades: newspaper headlines that can be read in unintended ways (like "British Left Waffles on Falklands"). I've already received a plethora of emails from readers who wanted to share crash blossoms that they've collected over the years.  Continue reading...

When google, a verb meaning "to search the Internet," was chosen by the American Dialect Society as Word of the Decade (2000-09), my ADS colleague Grant Barrett wondered whether Google's trademark lawyers might have preferred it if the runner-up, blog, had won instead. It is of course a tribute to the vast popularity of Google that it has become accepted as a generic verb for online searching, but the protectors of the trademark wouldn't necessarily see it that way. Meanwhile, Microsoft, creators of the rival search engine Bing, would very much like people to use their brand name as a verb.  Continue reading...

When the New Oxford American Dictionary selected unfriend as its 2009 Word of the Year, Oxford University Press senior lexicographer Christine Lindberg was quick to point out that the verb long predates the Facebook era. As she explained in an NPR interview, the Oxford English Dictionary has a citation for unfriend from 1659. "I think it's a remarkable resurrection," Lindberg told NPR. "In a way, I look at unfriend as the Sleeping Beauty of 2009 words." Now it appears that the Dutch language has its own Sleeping Beauty... or should that be Rip Van Winkle?  Continue reading...