Google has now had the top spot for three straight months, and it is worth noting that it has been at or near the top almost every month since we announced that the word was being entered in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. (Before that, google almost never ranked high in the list.) Our guess is that the look-ups don't come from people who need to know the meaning of the word as much as from people checking to see if google really is in the dictionary. It is.

One of the words that moved up the most in rank was ubiquitous. We have no explanation for this other than that the use of the word ubiquitous is becoming more and more . . . well . . . ubiquitous. The word moving down the most was quagmire, but it had been unusually high in January. We will leave it to others to explain the significance in this.

Slipping off the list this month were obsequious and epiphany; returning after a short absence were superfluous and agnostic.

Love moved up three spots to Number 4, and in a possibly related move, irony moved down seven spots to Number 19. We have to assume that this had something to do with the benign effects of Valentine's Day, although Cupid's views on irony are not officially known.