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May 2005Just Foolin' AroundHaving fun with an online dictionary takes a different form from flipping through the pages of a bound book, but the results are equally enjoyable. Find out the differences and see how you can use the online dictionary to find out which words and word usages irk the usage commentators. June 2005Just Foolin' AroundWell before George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode III–Revenge of the Sith came out people were trying to look up sith in the dictionary. You won’t find this use of sith in any dictionary just yet, but it does almost sound like English. Why? See what happens when we “fool around” with sith. August 2005Just Foolin' AroundThe dog days of summer find plenty of folks seeking relief in cold desserts. The dictionary can help—here's a taste. October 2005Just Foolin' AroundThe first German Oktoberfest dates back to Munich, 1810. These days, more than one million gallons of beer are consumed during the annual two week Bavarian festival that begins in September and concludes on the first Sunday in October. Want to participate vicariously? Click here. January 2006Just Foolin’ AroundBenjamin Franklin’s 300th birthday, along with the chilly weather, has gotten us thinking about inventors who have given their names to inventions (think Franklin stove). The list is easy to create with the Advanced Search option. February 2006Just Foolin’ AroundFebruary is not the only word whose proper pronunciation is a matter for debate. Interested in checking out other words in that group? Choose the Collegiate Dictionary, click on Advanced Search and then, in the Usage Paragraph box, type pronunciation and enter. You can preview the results right here. March 2006Just Foolin' AroundYou can take note of Women's History Month by researching some of the dozens of terms that refer to female versions of male titles, such as danseuse, administratrix, and interlocutress. To get started, select the Unabridged as your reference and click on Advanced Search. Type woman in Definition, feminine in Etymology, and noun in Function; then click Search. Read on to see the results. April 2006Just Foolin' AroundNow that we're more than halfway through National Poetry Month, you may be ready to move beyond "April showers bring May flowers." If so, why not play around online? Click here for some tips. May 2006Just Foolin’ AroundOn the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo), Mexicans and Mexican-Americans celebrate the day in 1862 when badly outnumbered Mexicans routed the French army of Napoleon III at Puebla. In honor of the day, we tried out a number of searches with interesting results. June 2006Just Foolin’ AroundThe season of graduation and commencement sent plenty of folks looking up the terms alma mater and baccalaureate last month, and it reminded us of how very many of our education terms have an etymological link to Latin. Here are a few favorites, together with the translation of the word's Latin ancestor. For a full list, chose the Unabridged as your reference, click on Advanced Search, type "school" in the Definition box and "Latin" in the Etymology box, then click Search. November 2006Just Foolin' AroundNovember 5 is Guy Fawkes Day, the day in 1605 when conspirator Guy Fawkes was seized for plotting to blow up the British House of Lords. The day is celebrated in England with masked children begging "a penny for the guy." Eventually, guy came to refer to "man," "boy," "fellow." Just for fun, we checked out other slangy "guy" terms. It's easy to do. Select the Unabridged as a Reference, then click on Advanced Search. Type guy in the Definition field and slang in the Usage box and click on Search. February 2007Just Foolin' AroundFebruary is the perfect time to fool around with terms of love. By typing love into both the Definition and the Etymology fields of the Unabridged Dictionary Advanced Search, you get a list of 39 terms, ranging from agape to Venus. Here are a few of the more delightful terms for the 14th. March 2007Just Foolin' AroundSpring fever is defined as "a lazy or restless feeling often associated with the onset of spring." Feel like wasting a little time mulling over a few adjectives meaning "lazy" or "restless?" Our search netted 23 lazy adjectives and 24 restless ones. It's easy to play around with adjectives online. Select the Unabridged as your reference source, and click on Advanced Search. Type "adjective" in the Function field, and type whatever adjective interests you — lazy, restless, or others! — in the Definition field. Then click on Search and start fooling around with your list. April 2007Just Foolin' AroundApril Fool's Day is a fine time to fool around with dozens of fools that have found a home in the dictionary. Ready to get started? May 2007Just Foolin' AroundMemorial Day (then known as Decoration Day) was first observed in 1868, to commemorate the sacrifices of Civil War soldiers. Today, soldiers from many more wars are honored. Using the search fields in the Collegiate Dictionary, we found 117 terms relating to soldiers, ranging from adventurer (a soldier of fortune) to yardbird (a soldier assigned to a menial task or restricted to a limited area as a disciplinary measure). We've pulled out a few particularly interesting ones. Interested in the full list? Select the Collegiate as your reference source, then type soldier into the definition field and noun into the function field and click on Search. June 2007Just Foolin' AroundWant to celebrate Father's Day by fooling around in the dictionary? Try tracing the meanings, the offspring, and the fatherhood of various father terms. September 2007Just Foolin' AroundAlthough ratatouille didn't break into the Top Twenty list this summer, it did rank high for a while, probably because of the hit animated movie of that same name. Ratatouille comes from the French and it refers to a stew made of eggplant, tomatoes, green peppers, squash, and sometimes meat and seasoned with garlic and other condiments. Sounds good? Read on. November 2007Just Foolin' AroundThe traditional start of the holiday shopping season, the day after Thanksgiving, is known as Black Friday. Although that combination phrase does not appear as an entry of its own in the Unabridged Dictionary, black Friday does appear as an example used to illustrate the sense of the adjective black meaning "marked by the occurrence of disaster." If shopping on that busiest of days spells disaster to you, why not instead while away the day fooling around with color references on Merriam-Webster Unabridged? We started with black, but you can choose whatever you'd like. January 2008Just Foolin' AroundJust weeks into 2008 and folks may be struggling to stick to their new year's resolutions. We can't help with that, but we can offer up some interesting reading with the word promise. To find promise, select the Unabridged as your reference and click on Advanced Search. Then type promise in the Definition field and click on Search. The 214 entries range from abide to greener pastures. April 2008Just Foolin' AroundAfter Senator Barack Obama used the word divisive three times in his speech on race in America, that adjective jumped onto the Top Twenty List for a day or two. We suspect the searches had less to do with the meaning of divisive than with Obama's pronunciation of it. He said \dih-VISS-iv\, a variant pronunciation which is preceded by the label also. The first pronunciation given at the entry is \dih-VYCE-iv\. Variant pronunciations marked also are considered standard, although they are appreciably less frequent than those not so noted. Although you can't search our online dictionaries for all the words with variant pronunciations, you can get some interesting results by typing the word pronunciation into the Definition field on the Advanced Search page. The search returns over 100 results from Americanize to wharl. May 2008Just Foolin' AroundThe first comic strip, The Yellow Kid, hit the funny pages on May 5, 1895. Curious about linguistic contributions made by cartoonists? It's funny how many there are, ranging from Alphonse and Gaston to shazam to mickey-mouse (noun, interjection, verb!). Want to see even more? Select either the Unabridged or the Collegiate and choose Etymology from the pull-down menu of search types. Type cartoon in the box, and click on Search. For a larger list, try comic as your Etymology search term. You will get slightly different lists from each reference. June 2008Just Foolin' AroundOnce again, events in Myanmar (formerly Burma) helped move the term junta high onto the list of most-looked-up words for a few days last month. In October 2007, we reviewed the history of junta, the term applied to that nation's military rulers. This month, we fooled around a bit with the history of junta and found a wealth of words. October 2008Just Foolin' AroundBlame 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. November 2008Just Foolin' AroundOnce again, albeit appeared on the Top Twenty List. The Middle English albeit literally meant "all though it be." Albeit is one of literally hundreds of words whose etymology includes literally in the story of origin. We started investigating those literal stories and came up with both a few favorites and a method of reviewing the hundreds of dictionary entries. January 2009Just Foolin’ AroundAndré-Marie Ampère was born in January 1775 and James Watt in January 1776. Sure, it's coincidental, but if you're at all interested in terms named for people of science, you might get a charge out of using the Unabridged to discover scientific eponyms this month. To find more science terms named for individuals, choose either the Unabridged or the Collegiate for your reference, select Etymology from the Search Type drop-down menu, type scientist, physicist, inventor, or mathematician into search box, and click Search. February 2009Just Foolin' AroundFebruary is the month to fool around and fall in love. See the fancy words for a sweetheart we found for this Valentine's Day. Want to find your own? Select the Collegiate as the reference, click on Advanced Search, type love in the Definition field, and click on Search. March 2009Just Foolin' AroundMattel's Barbie doll was inspired by a German doll and introduced at the International Toy Fair on March 9, 1959. You won't find Barbie in the dictionary, but the 50-year-old still has her looks, and her figures would be impressive for anyone: over one billion dolls sold to date. The Unabridged is rich in other terms naming dolls. A few, like Barbie, have international associations; another has a historical overtone; and a few terms even have negative applications. Read up on all of them. June 2009Just Foolin' AroundOf the 470,000 entries in the Unabridged, only 536 end with the letters i-o-u-s. Do we owe the shaky economy for bringing four of those "IOUs" onto last month's Top Twenty List? Certainly not: those words (facetious, pretentious, egregious, and tenacious) are perennial look-up favorites. But what's with the i-o-u-s words? October 2009Just Foolin' AroundIt isn't often that Merriam-Webster is itself part of a news story, but that's what happened last month when President Obama appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. The two men disagreed on whether one of the president's proposals regarding health insurance policy should properly be classified as a tax. Stephanopoulos quoted Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary to support his case, and the word tax rose high in the lookup rankings for a day or so. The president, in turn, even referred to us by name, calling us "Merriam." November 2009Just Foolin’ AroundThe release of the film Love Happens sent folks looking up quidnunc for a few days last month. That's because the movie's quirky female lead (played by Jennifer Aniston) writes that word (among others) on hotel walls. A quidnunc is a busybody; the word derives from the Latin for what now? Interested in knowing the scoop on words about gossiping? We looked at all the terms in the Unabridged that include gossip as part of their definition. Check out a few of the more colorful words we discovered. If you're interested in researching the words in the dictionary that share a key defining term, choose the Unabridged or the Collegiate as your reference, select Definition from the pull-down menu, type in the word that interests you, and click on Search. February 2010Just Foolin' AroundLast month, Senator John McCain's 2008 campaign aide Steve Schmidt described Sarah Palin as "very calm—nonplussed" when she first got the news that she had been tapped as McCain's choice for vice president. People puzzled by that description made nonplussed one of the most looked-up words in the Online Dictionary for a couple of days. Was Palin peaceful, as the context of the quotation implies, or perplexed, which is the generally accepted meaning of nonplussed? This confusion may be the result of a kind of sense drift: a word was used to mean something other than what the dictionary says it means. March 2010Just Foolin' AroundReports 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. April 2010Just Foolin' AroundLast month's most looked-up word list welcomed the annual appearance of leprechaun on St Patrick's Day. Leprechaun comes from Irish Gaelic: lu (small) + corpan (body). According to legend, that small-bodied creature will reveal hidden treasure to the person lucky enough to catch him. We caught a few similar creatures by fooling around with the Advanced Search function of the Unabridged; just type in the words "small creature" in the definition box to get the results. May 2010Just Foolin' AroundAfter President Obama used the word vitriol to describe the rhetoric of commentators Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, vitriol rose high on the lookup list last month. The burning interest in vitriol makes linguistic sense if you consider the word's usage and history. |