You don't need much imagination to guess why people who work in the dictionary world would be interested in new words, but the research methods for finding them are much more wide-ranging and intensive than you might imagine.  Continue reading...

Linguistically, it seems, the second decade of the 21st century was all about our selves. At its annual meeting the American Dialect Society selected (my) pronouns as its word of the year for 2019 and singular or nonbinary they as the word of the decade.  Continue reading...

It's time to dive headfirst into that confoundingest of subjects: the formation of comparatives and superlatives.  Continue reading...

In many ways, Prohibition was a social and legal failure, but in one respect it succeeded wildly: It vastly enriched our lexicons of slang and marketing, often to lasting effect.  Continue reading...

If we start from the fact that language is first and foremost a spoken activity, the methods by which people have extended its powers to writing offer a fascinating lens into human history.  Continue reading...

In the American West, wildfires have become both more frequent and more destructive. With this ominous shift has come a new vocabulary for describing fire and its outcome – and new attention to some of the oldest words in our language.  Continue reading...