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  1. Candlepower

     Book Titles Made Easy: Nine Fast Formulas for Fame, Fortune, and a Good Night's Sleep
    Mon Aug 04 00:00:00 EDT 2008

    Writing a book is hard: just ask any author. But coming up with a title for your book? That's easy.

    Honestly.

    Oh, you've probably heard a different story, about how choosing a book title is the toughest part of the whole endeavor. But I'm going to share with you a six-word secret for skipping directly to a happy ending: Find a formula and copy it.

  2. Blog Excerpts

     Back in Black: On the Origins of "Black Friday"
    Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 EST 2012
    On Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, Americans kick off the holiday shopping season with a bang. In his Word Routes column last year, lexicographer Ben Zimmer explored the origins of the phrase "Black Friday." It is not, as many believe, the day when retailers' balance sheets change from red to black.

  3. Contest

     The Visual Thesaurus Crossword Puzzle: October Edition
    Fri Oct 26 00:00:00 EDT 2012
    We're feeling a bit spooky, so this month we have a Halloween-themed crossword for you. Figure out the word chain and you could win a Visual Thesaurus T-shirt!

  4. Lesson Plans

     Water, Water, Everywhere
    Thu Oct 06 00:00:00 EDT 2011
    How can students use the Visual Thesaurus to define and identify various geography terms that represent bodies of water?

  5. Candlepower

     Vocab Lab: If Left to My Own Poetic Devices...
    Thu Jul 17 00:00:00 EDT 2008
    I love the assonance in my name, the repeated long "u" sound in Julia Rubiner. Which isn't to say I haven't daydreamed that my name is Julia Jubiner (or for that matter, in the manner of Scooby Doo, Rulia Rubiner) because then I'd enjoy both assonance and alliteration, two of my favorite poetic devices, and, as I've learned in my copywriting work, two great tastes that taste great together (the writer who coined that phrase on behalf of Reese's to describe the relationship between peanut butter and chocolate clearly knew a thing or two about assonance).

  6. Evasive Maneuvers

     What's the Euphemism of the Year?
    Wed Jan 06 00:00:00 EST 2016
    It's hard to believe another year has left the building, leaving us all closer to singing with the angels, talking a dirt nap, or insert your euphemism for death here. Like any other year, 2015 was full of new words and old words newly prominent. While many of these terms were stalwart members of the lexicon, others were sneaky, sketchy, and suspect: there were euphemisms aplenty.

  7. Behind the Dictionary

     Predicting New Words
    Thu Jan 03 00:00:00 EST 2008
    How do words enter our lexicon? Which ones survive in our language? Which ones die? Forensic linguist Dr. Allan Metcalf has developed a method to predict the success or failure of a word that's almost foolproof. English professor and registrar of MacMurray College in Illinois, Allan is also the Executive Secretary of the American Dialect Society, which famously announces their annual Word of the Year. It is this exercise that served as the catalyst for Allan's investigations, which he explains in his book Predicting New Words. We spoke to him about his fascinating findings, and, of course, the Word of the Year:

  8. Blog Excerpts

     A Taxing Day for Dictionaries
    Mon Apr 15 00:00:00 EDT 2013
    "Yes, April 15th is still the dreaded tax day," writes Mim Harrison. "But thanks to Samuel Johnson, it's also a great day for the English language and its wealth of wonderful words." That's because it is the date on which Johnson published his monumental dictionary of the English language in 1755. Read Harrison's look back at Johnson's Dictionary here.

  9. Word Routes

     From "Cyber Monday" to "Cyber Week"
    Mon Nov 26 00:00:00 EST 2012
    Retailers, not content with branding products, have lately taken to branding days of the week, as a way to hype the holiday shopping rush. "Black Friday," the name for the day after Thanskgiving, was transformed from a negative to a positive by some clever etymological mythologizing (make that etymythologizing). Then the Monday after Thanksgiving was christened "Cyber Monday," and now some marketers would like to extend that to a "Cyber Week."

  10. Candlepower

     How Words Become Names (Part One)
    Mon Oct 08 00:00:00 EDT 2007
    When you're naming a business or a product, you look at words through a different lens than the novelist or historian. They think in sentences, paragraphs, chapters, or even volumes; you must think in single-word nuggets of meaning. Your job is to distill the essence -- and even the unknown future -- of your product or company in one, or sometimes two, perfectly suited words.
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