How the word "wombat" entered the English language turns out to be a surprisingly complex story. Australian linguist David Nash tells the tale here.

A blog commenter recently described the linguistic situation in her household as "a mixmash of English and German." As she later explained, the word mixmash was invented by her daughters to describe their experiences growing up bilingual. Now, mixmash is not a word you'll find in any dictionary, but it's easy enough to appreciate it as a mash-up of mix and (mish)mash. It's a wonderful example of how speakers of English are constantly mixing and mashing the lexicon, and yet somehow we manage to understand each other just fine.  Continue reading...

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!

The countdown is on for the American Dialect Society's selection for 2008 Word of the Year, the oldest and most prestigious WOTY event in the land. The ADS selection will happen Friday, January 9, at the group's annual meeting, held this year in San Francisco. The voting is open to the public, so Visual Thesaurus readers in the Bay area are welcome to drop in for the WOTY fun. I'll be attending (I'm on the ADS Executive Council), and I have a few favorites I'll be lobbying for. One of them is a word that offers a ray of light in our current moment of economic doom and gloom: shovel-ready.  Continue reading...

In this anniversary edition of Language Lounge we return to the topic that started it all — sound symbolism — in our quest to learn the true meaning of /oi/.  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.