When google, a verb meaning "to search the Internet," was chosen by the American Dialect Society as Word of the Decade (2000-09), my ADS colleague Grant Barrett wondered whether Google's trademark lawyers might have preferred it if the runner-up, blog, had won instead. It is of course a tribute to the vast popularity of Google that it has become accepted as a generic verb for online searching, but the protectors of the trademark wouldn't necessarily see it that way. Meanwhile, Microsoft, creators of the rival search engine Bing, would very much like people to use their brand name as a verb.  Continue reading...

Looking for alternatives to Google that might be more appropriate for students? Check out these search engines.

Quintura Kids

Ask for Kids

Fact Monster

Yahoo Kids

Twitter is becoming a great haven for wordplay. Check out the creativity on display in tweets marked with the hashtag #collectivenouns: "a knot of string theorists," "a sneer of critics," "a wunch of bankers," "a seemingly empty room of ninjas." The website All Sorts is collecting the results of this collective online experiment.

For the past few years, the Visual Thesaurus has been a proud partner of The New York Times Learning Network, helping students boost their reading, writing and communications skills. We've been working together to develop innovative lesson plans that integrate the Visual Thesaurus with engaging articles from the pages of The New York Times. Now, as the Learning Network gets a new look, re-launched as a Times blog, we're working even more closely to provide new resources for teaching and learning.  Continue reading...

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is just around the corner. As the website explains, "Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved." Visit the NaNoWriMo website to learn more.

You can read it. You can watch it. You can talk about it online with your friends. It's a sort of picture book — or, more precisely, a moving-picture book — but its inventors call it a Vook. That's Vook as in video + book.  Continue reading...