September 2009

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.

  1. pretentious
  2. agnostic
  3. cynical
  4. gorgeous
  5. albeit
  6. facetious
  7. apathetic
  8. quite
  9. ubiquitous
  10. through
 
  1. integrity
  2. emaciated
  3. hypocrite
  4. conundrum
  5. poignant
  6. effect
  7. whether
  8. egregious
  9. platonic
  10. ensure

Old friends like integrity, conundrum, and hypocrite have made the top twenty for many months now. The words ending in –ious or –eous continue to be a rich source of curiosity among the users of the Online Dictionary. But emaciated, used to describe the condition of Michael Jackson's body at the time of his death, garnered the highest number of single-day lookups this summer. Poignant was widely used in accounts of Paris Jackson’s remarks at her father’s memorial service. Both words have classical roots, a common element shared by many words in each month’s top twenty list.