There has been much ado about the specific clothing, furniture, and products in the hit AMC series Mad Men. Of course, fans love the accurate details. The afternoon cocktails and elaborate dresses are a constant reminder of how much has changed since the 1960s. The show gets the set right, but what about the dialogue? Is the language on Mad Men accurate? Apparently not. There are …
Do you call it a sub? A grinder? A hoagie? A poor boy? That all depends on where you live. The Dictionary of American Regional English has been more than 40 years in the making. In the early 60s, lexicographers and linguists led by the University of Wisconsin at Madison sprawled all over the country in search of unique words. They found zin-zins (a duck …
A group of physicists recently collaborated on a statistical survey of words. You may be wondering why physicists are interested in language. In this case, it is not language per se, but how words imitate the statistical patterns of the stock market and animal populations. This group of researchers, led by Alexander Petersen of the IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, culled data from Google’s …
Encyclopedia Britannica announced that they will stop publishing print editions of their books. The renowned encyclopedia publisher was not slow in jumping on the digital bandwagon: they published a version for computers as early as 1981, and they went online in 1994. Though they are no longer publishing print editions, the company will continue to operate digitally. Of course, this doesn’t mean encyclopedias are going …
Censorship is probably as old as language itself. Okay, maybe it’s not that old, but there were censorship laws in Ancient Greece and in Dynastic China more than 2,000 years ago. From the Latin verb censere meaning “to appraise, value or judge,” the word “censor” was first used to name the Roman official who oversaw public morals. How censorship is implemented, though, shifts over time. Today, …
It’s no surprise that many of our place names are relatively new to English. Some (like Far East) were born during British colonization, but “Near East” and “Middle East” are more modern than that. The word “east” is derived from the Sanskrit word “usās” meaning “dawn” or “morning.” From the perspective of Europe and Asia, this makes sense because the sun rises in the east. …
New software being developed at Oxford University may be able to instantly measure the emotions and reactions of large populations by evaluating the words we use on the internet. Investors seem to think this idea will pay off. So, why do we care? Well, this software, called TheySay, uses something called corpora linguistics, which basically means taking a whole bunch of text (whether Dickens’ novels …
Where would you have lived 200 million years ago? And will your descendants in Los Angeles or Bangkok live in Amasia instead of Asia or North America? Maybe you’ve heard of Pangaea – the theoretical supercontinent that existed 200–300 million years ago and consisted of all the landmasses pushed together. Coined by Alfred Wegener in 1927, “Pangaea“
New research argues that the answer is yes. Depending on what language you speak, you are more – or less – likely to save for retirement. Your primary tongue may even affect how much you weigh. In January, M. Keith Chen, an associate professor of economics at the School of Management at Yale University, published a working paper on his research about the effect of …
Here is the final installment of our interview with Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times’ Crossword Puzzle and NPR’s Puzzlemaster. Find out his favorite crossword word and why English is the best language to make crosswords in. Dictionary.com: What are your general ideas about the relationship between language and crosswords? Will Shortz: The English language may be the best language in the …
Though it’s a high-value letter in Scrabble and Words with Friends, H is a relatively common letter. Statistically speaking, it is the eighth most commonly used letter in the English language. That’s because H is usually paired with other consonants like wh, ch, sh, and gh. H is found in the most common two-letter pair (th) and in the most common three-letter combination (the). (The letter …
We had the opportunity to sit down with Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times’ Crossword Puzzle and NPR’s Puzzlemaster. Learn about the history of the crossword and how it’s intertwined with the dictionary.