Navigating Merriam-Webster's Visual Dictionary Online is effortless and a great deal of fun. 15 major themes offer a variety of engaging, browsable topics. Students can search for illustrated science topics like nuclear fission, anatomy of a frog, and plant cell. Train buffs can scroll through the rail transport section. Homeowners can follow the plumbing system or browse the do-it-yourself section. Or, users can type a term like narwhal into the easy index search box to zero in on an illustration of the marine creature with a spiraled, ten-foot tusk.

The society says it just charts words or phrases that have become prominent in a particular year, and is not telling people how to speak.

"Subprime" means literally "less than ideal" and is the technical term used to describe loans - especially mortgages - made to borrowers with poor credit histories.

A series of defaults on such loans spread panic through much of the banking sector in 2007 as financial institutions realised they had bought many of these loans from one another without knowing how risky they were.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary announced this month that it has committed punctuational genocide, eliminating 16,000 hyphens from its pages. Either by combining two words into one or simply uncoupling them-severing the corpus callosum between them-editors of the dictionary's sixth edition have seen fit to knock hyphens from its pages like so many teeth from a hockey goaltender's mouth. So, ice-cream becomes ice cream and chick-pea chickpea.

But wait, how many of us were still hyphenating ice cream anyway? Does this announcement merely remove the fig-leaf (sorry, fig leaf) barely covering the fact that the Shorter OED was in major need of some long overdue updates? "The dictionary reflects the language as it's being used today," concedes Jesse Sheidlower, Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary. "In general you'll find that most dictionary editors are extremely progressive. As with any change like this, there's some point at which you want to be a little conservative. You don't want to change an entry the second there is some change in the language." (The Shorter OED is essentially the OED without its supporting quotations and most obsolete words. It was last updated in 2002; the OED itself has been updated only in part and only online.)

This particular change suggests that British English, which the OED catalogs, is becoming increasingly Americanized. How many Limeys were running scared of bumble-bees in their gardens this summer? Sheidlower stresses that the changes were based on findings made combing through British, not American, published texts. "We would use the most formal, most edited evidence," he says. "We incorporate American evidence, but the dictionary is edited in England and does represent British standards."

If it sounds as though Merriam-Webster is dropping its buttoned-down image with too much talk of "smackdowns" (contests in entertainment wrestling) and "telenovelas" (Latin-American soap operas), consider it also is adding "gray literature" (hard-to-get written material) and "microgreen" (a shoot of a standard salad plant.)

No matter how odd some of the words might seem, the dictionary editors say each has the promise of sticking around in the American vocabulary.

"There will be linguistic conservatives who will turn their nose up at a word like 'ginormous,'" said John Morse, Merriam-Webster's president. "But it's become a part of our language. It's used by professional writers in mainstream publications. It clearly has staying power."

One of those naysayers is Allan Metcalf, a professor of English at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society.

"A new word that stands out and is ostentatious is going to sink like a lead balloon," he said. "It might enjoy a fringe existence."

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too Cna yuo raed tihs? i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.

The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

"Plutoed" has been chosen as word of the year for 2006 by the American Dialect Society, beating "climate canary" in a run-off vote.

If you have been "plutoed" you have been demoted or devalued, just as happened to the former planet Pluto when its status was downgraded.

A "climate canary" is something whose poor health indicates a looming environmental catastrophe.

This is the 17th time ADS members have voted to choose a word of the year.

As expected, there were a few surprises in store for us as we pored through your submissions for our first Word of the Year online survey. Either the vast majority of you out there in the Merriam-Webster online community are big fans of The Colbert Report, or Time Magazine was right on target when it honored the show's host Stephen Colbert earlier this year as one of the most influential people of 2006. By an overwhelming 5 to 1 majority vote, our visitors have awarded top honors to a word Colbert first introduced on "The Word" segment of his debut broadcast on Comedy Central back in October 2005.

1. truthiness (noun)

1. : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)
2. : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

1. google
2. decider
3. war
4. insurgent
5. terrorism
6. vendetta
7. sectarian
8. quagmire
9. corruption

New Zealand's high school students will be able to use "text-speak" -- the mobile phone text message language beloved of teenagers -- in national exams this year, officials said.

Text-speak, a second language for thousands of teens, uses abbreviated words and phrases such as "txt" for "text", "lol" for "laughing out loud" or "lots of love," and "CU" for "see you."

The move has already divided students and educators who fear it could damage the English language.

New Zealand's Qualifications Authority said Friday that it still strongly discourages students from using anything other than full English, but that credit will be given if the answer "clearly shows the required understanding," even if it contains text-speak.

Critics said the National Certificate of Educational Achievement or NCEA, the main qualification for high school students, would be degraded by the authority allowing text speak use in exams.

Internet blogger Phil Stevens was not amused by the announcement. "nzqa[New Zealand Qualifications Authority]: u mst b joking," Stevens wrote. "or r u smoking sumthg?"

The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to finish off longhand. When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive. Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship instruction seems a relic, teachers across the region say. But academics who specialize in writing acquisition argue that it's important cognitively, pointing to research that shows children without proficient handwriting skills produce simpler, shorter compositions, from the earliest grades.

Scholars who study original documents say the demise of handwriting will diminish the power and accuracy of future historical research. And others simply lament the loss of handwritten communication for its beauty, individualism and intimacy.

*****

There are those who say the culture is at a crossroads, turning permanently from the written word to the typed one. If handwriting becomes a lost form of communication, does it matter? It was at U-Va. that researchers recently discovered a previously unknown poem by Robert Frost, written in his signature script. Handwritten documents are more valuable to researchers, historians say, because their authenticity can be confirmed. Students also find them more intriguing.

"They feel closer to that person as an actual human, that somebody actually wrote that just like me," said Jim Mohr, a professor of U.S. history at the University of Oregon at Eugene, who wrote a book on diaries from the Civil War. "There's a kind of personal authenticity to individual writing that's hard to capture any other way."

Britons are increasingly tech-savvy but are still bamboozled by tech jargon.

According to research from Nielsen/NetRatings, people are buying cutting-edge technology but often don't understand the terms that describe what their device actually does.

So while 40% of online Britons receive news feeds, 67% did not know that the official term for this service was Really Simple Syndication.

Terms such as podcasting and wikis are still meaningless to many.

Search engine giant Google has sent off a series of legal letters to media organizations, warning them against using its name as a verb. The California-based company is becoming concerned about trademark violation, with a spokesman confirming that it had sent the letters, saying, "We think it's important to make the distinction between using the word Google to describe using Google to search the internet, and using the word Google to describe searching the internet. It has some serious trademark issues."

In June, Google won a place in the Oxford English Dictionary, while "to google", with a lower case "g", was included last month in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, America's leading reference book. Meanwhile, the online service WordSpy, defines "google" as: "To search for information on the Web, particularly by using the Google search engine; to search the Web for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend." This is also what pops up first if you type "googling" into Google.

In an attempt to protect the company's trademark, the letters have raised sneers after they were leaked on to the web, with bloggers making fun of the examples Google's lawyers deem acceptable. They included: "Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate: I googled that hottie."

However, according to the Independent's report, eyebrows may be raised, too, in the publishing and media industries, which are worried about Google's encroachment on their intellectual property via its Google News pages and its plan to put every book ever published on to the web.

For each word, we performed a Yahoo image search and retrieved 50 image results. (If fewer than 50 images were found, we deemed the word too obscure and discarded it.) Then for each image we averaged the values of the pixels in the middle and then averaged those 50 results. We brightened the colors slightly for display.

Need tips on how to groom a unibrow or soul patch? Just google it. Or get a mouse potato to do it for you. If you're still lost, grab the latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary for a definition of those and about 100 other words that have made their way into its pages. But be warned: you might come across a drama queen (a person given to often excessively emotional performances or reactions), an empty suit (an ineffectual executive), or a himbo (an attractive but vacuous man _ think "male bimbo".)

"We try to have a mix that addresses the wide range of people's information needs when adding new words," said John Morse, president of the Springfield-based dictionary publisher. "It could be a technical term or some light-hearted slang that sends people to a dictionary." To make it into the dictionary, a word has to be more than a flash-in-the-pan fad. It needs staying power.

"We need evidence that the word is showing up in publications that people are reading on an everyday basis," Morse said. Lexicographers comb through national newspapers, entertainment magazines, trade journals and Web sites in search of new words and phrases. As has been the case during the past several years, Merriam-Webster's lexicographers have been largely preoccupied with technology and computers for its latest edition, which will be widely available at the end of the summer.

Novelist Thinks People Shrug 10 Times More Than They Actually Do

BOSTON-According to his handful of readers, budding novelist Mosley Forstner, 23, thinks that people shrug with much greater frequency than they actually do. "Every time a character responds to something in Mosley's book, it's "'Suppose that's the way of things,' she shrugged" or "'Fine, then I'm leaving,' he shrugged," said Rodney Klein, a fellow student and peer reviewer of Forstner's. "Can't his characters just 'say' something once in a while?" When informed of the criticism, Forstner responded with a grunt and a curt, dismissive motion of his shoulders intended to convey nonchalance.

Brookes is not an environmentalist partial to the wood pigeon, but instead editor of the Chambers Dictionary, and is seeking to keep words from disappearing in the publisher's next edition which is slated for release in August.

"We've resisted the temptation for tossing words out," he said Monday at the London Book Fair.

Also on the save list are jobernowl (blockhead), logodaedalus (someone skilled in the manipulative use of words), incompossible (incapable of co-existing) and supernaculum (to the last drop), the kinds of words typically omitted by one-volume dictionaries once they fall out of usage.

"I think people who use grammar correctly are sexy because it means they're smart," says Laurie Rozakis, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Grammar and Style. While Rozakis often has been a lone grammar gendarme - she notes that her children may need serious therapy for the embarrassment she's caused them with her compulsion to correct - she sees others joining in her mission. Her book, published in 1997, has sold more than 100,000 copies and is in its second printing. She believes it is part of a societal shift.

"I think there's going to be a return to more formal styles of dressing ... and we're moving away from sloppy grammar," she says. "There's more of a return to traditional values." The cause? The tightened economy and increased competition in the workplace, she says. "You whiten your teeth, you get laser surgery on your eyes, and you learn how to speak and you learn how to write," she says. Rozakis, a former high school English teacher and now an English professor at Farmingdale State University on Long Island, N.Y., has a penchant for correction. "I live and die by the red pen," she says.

Indeed, she has been known to pull it out to fix a sign at the grocery store. She once knocked on a stranger's door to tell him he should demand his money back because his wrought-iron address sign said "ninty-nine" instead of "ninety-nine."

The word, of course, is derived from a combination of "broadcasting" and the Apple listening device "iPod." Some have said they resent the Apple branding and proposed "audioblogging" or "blogcast" or some such as an alternative, to no avail.

Oxford apparently will define the word as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player." The term was coined, according to the BBC, by journalist Ben Hammersley. Podcast was considered for the honor last year, but didn't gain wide use until this year.

"A rootkit is a set of software tools frequently used by a third party (usually an intruder) after gaining access to a computer system. These tools are intended to conceal running processes, files or system data, which helps an intruder maintain access to a system without the user's knowledge. Rootkits are known to exist for a variety of operating systems such as Linux, Solaris and versions of Microsoft Windows. A computer with a rootkit on it is called a rooted computer."

"The rootkit concept is the dominant controversial aspect of the 2005 Sony CD copy protection controversy, which has made the previously obscure concept of a rootkit much more widely known in the technology community, and to the general public."

A cliche is not just something that lots of people say; It's something that lots of people say and it conveys some sort of idea or message. A cliche is, in other words, a metaphor characterized by its overuse.

I have my own test to see if a phrase is a cliche or not. I read the first half of the sentence, then I ask myself, "do I just know (because everyone knows) how the sentence ends?" Someone recently submitted, "The gene pool could use a little chlorine." I knew this wasn't a cliche because when I say, "The gene pool could use what?" I don't know how to end the sentence.

Matchy-matchy

Match·y-match·y (mach' e\ mach' e\) / adj. / two or more things that go together, perhaps too well, in appearance, color or size; e.g., "Her pink KitchenAid mixer and pink floral kitchen towels are way too matchy-matchy."

Domestic

Do·mes·tic (do mes' tik) / adj. / pertaining to the family or household; sometimes dubiously followed by the word "goddess." Also refers to any artisanal food produced in or indigenous to this country, whether a carefully aged vinegar, a cured meat or a runny cheese. Some restaurants use it to suggest heightened quality, as in, "All of our farmstead cheeses are domestic."

Choco-dependent

Choc·o-de·pend·ent (ch ok o' di pen' dnt) / adj. / from the French choco-dependant, referring to a chocolate addict. A growing number of Americans are displaying the symptoms, which may include cold sweats, tremors and irritability that last until le fix - say, a square of François Pralus's 75-percent Madagascar bar -- is administered. Take your medicine!

"Heteroflexible" is someone who is usually -- but not always -- heterosexual.

"Supersize," the fast food menu word for big portions, can now be both an adjective and a verb, as in "supersize me."

And to "go commando" means "to wear no underpants."