William Safire is surely known to Visual Thesaurus readers as the man behind "On Language," the weekly New York Times Magazine column that he has penned continuously since 1979. From 1973 to 2005 he was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for the Times, taking on the persona of a "vituperative right-wing scandalmonger," in his own self-deprecating terms. But since retiring from the Op/Ed page, his "word maven" persona is now ascendant, particularly with the latest edition of Safire's Political Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2008), a book that Newsweek has hailed as "the definitive work on the subject."  Continue reading...

To supplement our two-part interview with William Safire about the new edition of Safire's Political Dictionary, we've provided extended excerpts from the dictionary entries that came up in the course of our wide-ranging discussion. If you want to know the difference between an old pro and a curmudgeon, read on!  Continue reading...

Professional translators spend their days criss-crossing linguistic borders, so it's no surprise that they have some of the most intriguing insights on language.

Naked Translations

Working Languages

Thoughts on Translation

Translating is an Art

Transubstantiation

Does Art imitate Life? When the written word is involved it's not always easy to tell. This month in the Lounge, we examine the curious phenomenon of English word patterns that seem to occur mainly in fiction writing.  Continue reading...

Ever wonder where, exactly, words are stored in your brain? We thought so! Read the Sharp Brains blog's fascinating explanation, plus give your own gray matter a workout with a word-associations exercise. Check it all out here.

Ben Zimmer, like most lexicographers we meet, has a fascinating a background: A self-described "dictionary hound" as a kid, he volunteered in college as a "reader" for the Oxford English Dictionary, scanning music magazines for new terminology. He then worked as a linguistic anthropologist researching the languages of Indonesia before returning to his lexicographic roots. Long discussions with the OED editors about emerging technology led ultimately to his current job, as Editor for American Dictionaries at Oxford. It's a job where he's intimately involved with the Oxford English Corpus, a high-tech infrastructure for writing dictionaries. Ben graciously spoke to us about his work:  Continue reading...