Word.com

Summer TOP TWENTY

Summer has not exactly been uneventful for big news stories, but we see mostly familiar vocabulary terms in the aggregated summer list. The big exceptions are two words that were frequently looked up in the days following Michael Jackson’s death – one of which received the highest single-day count of lookups of any word this summer.

Happy Birthday 1969

Now that the hoopla over the 40th anniversary of Woodstock’s Three Days of Peace and Music has died down, let’s take a look at a few of the 174 words that first entered print that year (if not that summer):

Interested in the full list? Choose the Collegiate as your source, click on Advanced Search, then type the year in question into the Date box and hit Search.

Words in the News

Michael Jackson's death held the attention of many people for days and weeks this summer. Seeing the pattern of words looked up following such a news event can be a fascinating way to study the intersection of news and vocabulary. Which words are looked up first? Which are looked up most? Are they looked up for spelling or meaning?

From the Mail Server

Word lovers took time off from summer barbecuing to go online and ask our editors to clear up the distinction between online and on line.

Report from the Open Dictionary

The Open Dictionary didn't go on vacation this summer, and many contributions were added for words that are too new or too specialized to be entered in our print dictionaries. In some ways the Open Dictionary represents a kind of future dictionary of real words that are spotted and reported by the public.

Interested in adding a new word or new sense of an existing word to the Dictionary? We're always interested in the words that you hear and see that haven't yet been defined. Click for guidelines and join the amateur lexicographers!

Word History of the Month: jaded

When Brooke Shields memorialized Michael Jackson by declaring that "nothing was jaded" about her friend, jaded spiked on the most looked-up words list. A look in the dictionary reveals that the actress was using the sense of jaded that means "made dull, apathetic, or cynical by experience or by surfeit." Here's the story behind that term.

Something Old, Something New

Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities is a beautifully designed new book featuring more than 1500 original engravings that illustrated the Webster's dictionaries of the 19th century. Fine-press bookmaker Johnny Carerra cleaned and restored these outstanding engravings and compiled them into a visual reference work that is itself a work of art.

Carerra, a printmaker and bookbinder, used many of the original printer’s blocks to make new impressions. The book is a treasure of serendipitous research on many levels: the art is direct and compelling; the images represent choices made by the editors of another era in order to illustrate nature and the technology of the day; and the witty and idiosyncratic organization of the images creates an intriguing dialogue among them. It’s a reference book that’s also a book of ideas, history, and art.

Language Links

Over the summer, an innovative fundraising idea by the Noah Webster House and West Hartford Historical Society received national attention. Make Your Mark encourages supporters to carve graffiti into the museum’s wooden classroom desks to give them an authentic look. It seems that schoolchildren of the late 18th and early 19th century were likely to leave their marks on their desks, just as modern kids are. Noah Webster himself wrote: "When I was a schoolboy, the greatest part of the scholars did not employ more than an hour in a day, either in writing or in reading; while five hours...was spent in idleness, in cutting tables and benches to pieces…"

The museum will even give you a knife to do the carving!