We're very pleased to announce a brand-new feature: the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee! Taking advantage of our high-quality audio pronunciations, we've created a quiz that will sharpen your spelling skills and expand your vocabulary. And as everyone here in the office can attest, the quiz is downright addictive.  Continue reading...

Forget about red states and blue states... what really divides Americans is whether they call carbonated beverages pop or soda. (Or coke if you're in the South.) Check out the detailed maps on The Great Pop vs. Soda Controversy to see where the battle lines are drawn on this contentious question.

In Japanese, dogs say wan wan, but in Greek they say gav gav. Onomatopoetic words for animal sounds can be surprisingly different from language to language.

Derek Abbott's Animal Noise Page

Quack-Project

Animal Sounds in Foreign Languages

A hearty congratulations from all of us here at the Visual Thesaurus to Sameer Mishra, winner of the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee! Sameer, a 13-year-old from West Lafayette, Indiana, triumphed over his competitors by correctly spelling a very fitting word in the final round: guerdon, meaning "reward or payment." His reward was $35,000 in cash and various other prizes. The second-place finisher, Sidharth Chand of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, performed admirably on words like introuvable ("impossible to find"), but he eventually erred in spelling prosopopoeia, a personifying figure of speech.  Continue reading...

In honor of this year's National Spelling Bee, here are some books relating to the culture of competitive spelling.

American Bee

How to Spell Like a Champ

The Spelling List And Word Study Resource Book

Webster's Third New International Dictionary (aka the Bee Bible)

...and The Big Book of Spelling Tests, by our own Orin Hargraves.