Q. When I moved to New York thirty years ago, my friends in the area were using the word humungous. I don't believe it was in the dictionary at that time, but is it now?

A. When humongous first appeared in the ninth edition of the Collegiate Dictionary (1983), it was flagged as a slang term. The tenth edition (1993) added the less common variant spelling humungous to the entry and dropped the slang label. The eleventh edition (2003) defines humongous as "extremely large' and as a synonym of 'huge."

The etymology note in the Collegiate Dictionary suggests the possibility that humongous was an alteration and combination of the words huge and monstrous. The word appeared in a 1970 publication, Current Slang where it was defined as "very large" (a combination of huge and tremendous). The word dates back to at least the late 1960s.

While the word is no longer considered slang, it still has an informal quality to it. In print journalism, for example, the word is far more likely to be encountered in sports and entertainment coverage or in light human interest pieces rather than in hard news stories.

Q. In looking up the definition for half-staff, I was referred to half-mast. But a mast is a pole rising from the deck of a ship to which the sails and riggings are attached. Isn't it wrong to use half-staff interchangeably with half-mast?

A. In common English usage, half-mast and half-staff have been used synonymously to refer to the position of a flag on a staff since at least the early 18th century. While some distinction is drawn between the two terms in some military and governmental contexts, this distinction is not apparent in most examples of the use of half-mast.

Like many words in the English language, half-mast has broadened in meaning; it is no longer limited to its nautical origins. Using half-mast to describe the position at which a flag is flown on a staff is no less incorrect than using lousy to describe something which is inferior but which is not, in fact, infested with lice. Both words have long since developed broader, more general definitions that have only a figurative connection with their original meanings.

Q. You see these business names typically in strip malls: Bowl-a-rama, Tanorama, etc. I have not been able to find out where the -rama thing originated, or really what it designates.

A. The combining form -orama seems to have entered English through the word panorama, which was first used to describe a method of painting developed in the 1700s. Panorama is made up of the combining form pan-, meaning "all" or "every" plus the Greek word horama, meaning "sight or view." The earliest panoramas were landscapes or historical scenes painted in large cylinders, which were meant to be viewed from the center, but the word soon acquired more general meanings: a complete, unbroken view; a mental picture of a series of images or events; and a complete and comprehensive view or presentation of a subject matter.

In 1822, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype, and his partner Charles-Marie Bouton opened an exhibition in Paris. Borrowing the -orama of panorama, Daguerre named his exhibition of three-dimensional pictorial views the Diorama, giving rise to the word diorama. Soon -orama was used in the names of many exhibits that imitated the panorama or the diorama: cosmorama, cyclorama, georama, myriorama, and marinorama.

By the 1950s, -orama was being regularly used to create nouns that referred to displays, events, or other things that were sizable or expansive. In the earliest -orama words, the combining form was added to initial elements that came from ancient Greek, but by the middle of the 20th-century, -orama was being added to English initial elements, giving us everything from motorama, an exhibition of motor vehicles, to donutorama and ugly-o-rama.

Today, -orama signifies two things: either a scenic exhibit along the lines of a diorama or panorama, or a large or comprehensive event, display, etc.

We can't be sure, but it's reasonable to think that the business names you described are probably using the second sense of -orama. A bowl-a-rama, then, might be a place where there's lots of bowling. Of course, not every business name intentionally uses -orama with this sense in mind, and something like Tanorama might just be a play on the sound of panorama. In general, though, -orama implies that there's some sort of superlative quality about the business.