Promiscuous had been moving within the list during the spring but took over the top spot in June. For those of us not tuned into the pop music world, this was somewhat of a mystery. Then we heard about the song that had been topping the charts all summer—Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous Girl"—and it all began to make sense. Words from popular music seldom crack the Top Twenty, so we take a closer look at this one in this month's Word Profile.

The big news out of Merriam-Webster this summer came in July, when we announced the new words going into this year's printing to the Collegiate Dictionary. The word that seemed to grab the most attention was the verb to google. The new entry is careful to respect the legal status of the Google trademark, but news that the verb had made its way into the dictionary sent it to the top of list immediately.

The other new word that seems to strike people's fancy is mouse potato, and a month or so later, it's still hanging on in the Number 20 spot.

On a more serious note, the foiled attempt to attack U.S.-bound passenger airplanes in August prompted a host of event-related look-ups. We review some of them in this month's Words in the News. Two closely related words, fascist and fascism, particularly sparked interest when President Bush used the term fascist in connection with the terrorist attempt. We take a closer look at this word in this month's Word History of the Month.