Word.com

September TOP TWENTY

The political season may be winding down, but in September we saw plenty of evidence of it in the words being looked up online. Many of the words in the Top Twenty list are looked up regularly all year, but some clearly point to our users' acute interest in the presidential race.

Happy Birthday: 1958

Need some evidence that time flies? Consider this: October 1 marked the 50th anniversary of the founding of NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A surprising mixture of terms (scientific and cultural) share a birth year with NASA. See some of our favorites.

Or see the full list of 154 words for yourself. Select the Collegiate as your reference, click on Advanced Search, and type 1958 into the Date field and click Search.

Word History of the Month: maverick

After the Republican Convention in early September, maverick made its way into our most looked-up words list. The applicable definition of maverick is unambiguous: "an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party." But the etymology and the original definition hint at a story worth repeating.

Notable and Quotable: Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt was born October 27, 1858. The 26th president's refusal to shoot a captured bear on a hunting trip inspired the name teddy bear, and he also helped popularize the phrase bully pulpit. But of the 171 entries in the Unabridged which include "Roosevelt" in examples of actual usage, fewer than a dozen trace back to Theodore Roosevelt (almost all the others credit his younger cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt).

Interested in finding citations from a particular author? Choose either the Collegiate or the Unabridged as a reference and click on Advanced Search. Then type the last name in the "Author Quoted" field, and click on Search.

Just Foolin' Around

Blame it on politics: bipartisan rose to #30 in our list of most looked up words, as Web site users watching Washington checked for the dictionary definition of that term. Bipartisan efforts are those involving or marked by accord or cooperation between two major political parties; that definition inspired us to fool around with other terms of cooperation.

Plugging cooperation into the Definition field of the Unabridged Dictionary produces a total of 62 terms which use cooperation in their definitions. Plenty of these terms are political in nature; others extend beyond the political sphere. See some of our favorites.

From the Mail Server

Correspondents sent in a number of challenges and questions this month — about changing a word's spelling, about a small problem with grammatical functions, and some inside baseball about defining language.

Words in the News

Two thousand three hundred years ago, Aristotle described man as a "political animal." Last month, as interest in the surprise nomination of Gov. Sarah Palin to the Republican ticket became a national obsession, political observers of the American campaign trail sent vet (together with vetting and vetted) to the #1 position on the Top Twenty list. We are still political animals. But as for the verb to vet, what's the animal connection, you ask?

Language Links

Noah Webster, the father of the American dictionary, was born 250 years ago this month, on October 16, 1758. You can follow the historical development of old-fashioned English dictionaries the new-fashioned way. Browse Webster's original 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language. Or see Dr. Samuel Johnson's groundbreaking 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language. And the book considered to be the first English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual English Words, published by Robert Cawdrey in 1604, is now also available online.