February Top Twenty

For the second month in a row, doppelganger has been the subject of curiosity – and this time it was the most looked-up word for the month. The word was part of a Facebook promotion; it's also one of those words that is fun to say and not encountered every day. Other words looked up this month were inspired by news stories or used by newsmakers.

Notable Quotable: John Updike

John Updike, who died in early 2009, would have turned 78 on March 18. The Pulitzer Prize-winning short story writer, novelist, poet, and critic is celebrated in the Unabridged, which quotes the American author at 15 entries.

Interested in finding all the citations of a particular author? Select the Collegiate or the Unabridged as your reference, click on Advanced Search, and type the surname in the Author Quoted box.

Happy Birthday 1649

On March 17, 1649, six weeks after Charles I was beheaded, England's Rump Parliament passed an act formally abolishing the kingship. Oliver Cromwell's commonwealth did not last, but plenty of words born that same year remain an established part of English. Take a look at a few of the 79 words that date from 1649.

Interested in seeing all the words whose first print appearance dates to a particular year? Select the Collegiate as your reference, select Date from the pull-down menu, type the year of interest in the search box, and click on Search.

Words in the News

President Obama's declaration that he considers himself "agnostic" about various proposals targeting the federal deficit boosted agnostic to Number 12 last month. We've talked before about the history of the perennially looked-up agnostic, but the president wasn't using the word in its original, 19th century religious sense.

From the Mail Server

Last month's correspondents challenged our editors about slang etymology, crafted a query about inartful, and came back to the question of recurrence and reoccurrence.

In Case You Were Wondering

After American Idol announced it was dropping a contestant because of a "lack of veracity" during the audition process, veracity became the most looked up word for a week (but ended the month just out of the Top 50).

In case you were wondering, veracity, which has an ancestor in the Latin word for true or truthful, shares that ancestor with both verity and verisimilitude. In truth, all three nouns have shades of meaning worth parsing.

Report from the Open Dictionary

Merriam-Webster's Open Dictionary invites language watchers to pass along new or specialized words (or old words with new meanings) that have not yet made it into a standard print or online dictionary. Recent submissions to the Open Dictionary include terms about the recent extreme weather conditions on the East Coast and terms for new ways to organize, mix, and listen to audio recordings using the latest technology.

If you know a word that should be considered for entry in the dictionary, submit your word at the Submit an Entry page.

Just Foolin' Around

Reports that the accused shooter in last month's University of Alabama-Huntsville tragedy might have been angered at having been denied tenure helped move tenure to the Number 14 position in monthly lookups.

Academic tenure is the status that protects a teacher from summary dismissal. In effect, tenure "holds" a person's position, and that makes sound linguistic sense, since tenure counts tenere – the Latin verb meaning "to hold" – in its history.