As Major League Baseball heads into the All-Star break, we're taking advantage of the mid-season breather to think about the rich language of baseball. We talked to Paul Dickson, the sport's great lexicographer, about the monumental Dickson Baseball Dictionary. Recently published in its third edition, the dictionary has grown into a thousand-page tome of unprecedented breadth and scope. In the first part of our two-part interview, Dickson explains how his dictionary encompasses the whole history of baseball, from the early days of "protoball" to the latest statistical advances.  Continue reading...

In this month's contest, we challenge you to use the Visual Thesaurus to link two words together by clicking on the fewest number of related words. Entrants who can connect the words summer and break through the fewest number of words will receive a limited edition Visual Thesaurus T-shirt!  Continue reading...

Last time in Contest Corner, the challenge was to track down the answers to ten questions in a Visual Thesaurus treasure hunt. Congratulations to Catherine McIntyre of the English Language Institute at Texas A&M University for submitting ten correct answers. Catherine wins a Visual Thesaurus T-shirt! Her answers follow below.  Continue reading...

Why say "blizzard" when you could say "snow-mageddon"? And why refer to the "swine flu outbreak" when you could say "a-pork-alypse"? Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters considers some catastrophic coinages in his latest column for Good.