The most commonly searched words on Dictionary.com. The list includes such English GCSE staples as metaphor, irony, alliteration, effect, and affect. The most commonly referenced word is search – not because people want to know what it means, but because that’s the result you get when you press the Search button without entering text. Users: you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.
Also interesting is this list of words on the New York Times website that are looked up most frequently using the site’s built-in dictionary function. As a comparison with the Dictionary.com list, the most commonly-referenced words here are sui generis, solipsistic, louche, laconic, and saturnine.
The coldest temperature possible is −273·15°C, otherwise known as absolute zero: but is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?
Seems like an innocent enough question, right? Absolute zero is 0 on the Kelvin scale, or about minus 460 F. You can’t get colder than that; it would be like trying to go south from the South Pole. Is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?
Well, the answer, depending on which theoretical physicist you ask, is yes, no, or maybe. Huh? you ask. Yeah, that’s how I felt. And the question doesn’t just mess with the minds of physics dummies like me. Several physicists begged off of trying to answer it, referring me to colleagues. Even ones who did talk about it said things like "It’s a little bit out of my comfort zone" and "I think I’d like to ruminate over it." After I posed it to one cosmologist, there was dead silence on the other end of the line for long enough that I wondered if we had a dropped call.
Candidate temperatures range from 1017 K to 1032 K, the latter being one quadrillion times hotter than the former (although both are really quite warm).
I once asked if there was such a thing as a maximum temperature when learning about absolute zero in my A-level chemistry class; happily, it seems that it’s not as stupid a question as I assumed at the time.
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The millionth word in the English language was added last Tuesday morning, at exactly 10:22 am GMT. Well, no it wasn’t, but that didn’t stop Paul Payack of the Global Language Monitor claiming it was: at 10:22 am “Stratford-upon-Avon time”, the millionth word in the English language was announced to be the convenient-for-marketing-purposes phrase web 2.0.
If the outlandish claims of accuracy made by Payack didn’t already induce scepticism—he managed to measure this to the minute?—then the “word” which preceded the millionth should do so. Beating web 2.0 to the punch was the phrase jai ho!, a phrase which apparently gained “popularity” through the film Slumdog Millionaire (the word slumdog itself was apparently word number 999,997).
A quick comparison on Google suggests that web 2.0 is about 100 times more popular than jai ho!; a search on Nexis UK gives around 1,800 citations for jai ho in the year up to 7th June 2009, whereas web 2.0 is used over 2,000 times in the last month alone. It’s hard to see, then, what could cause jai ho to be recognised as entering English before web 2.0, unless, of course, it’s all made up for reasons of publicity and marketing.
For this reason, it was an enjoyable piece of schadenfreude to see Payack being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight who, to Payack’s seeming surprise, opens his questioning with “well this is rubbish this idea of yours, isn’t it?”, and gets more aggressive from there.
Microsoft launched a new search engine this week named Bing. The name seems odd, but, Microsoft being Microsoft, there are a lot of marketing reasons why it is so – the most interesting for a lexicographer being the (possibly optimistic) hope that it will start to get used as a verb:
If Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”
This verbification is an unusual thing for a company to want to one of its trademarks, for reasons explained by the Chambers Editors’ blog:
Becoming the generic term for a class of product is certainly confirmation of a brand’s dominance. However, if a trademark becomes genericized, the owners’ intellectual property rights to the word are threatened. Syntactic or morphological shifts such as verbification and pluralization can often signal a trademark’s demise and so are actively discouraged by the likes of Google™, Hoover™ and Xerox™ wishing to avoid the fate of escalator, kerosene, trampoline and yo-yo.
Google made the jump from noun to verb years ago: the verb is first attested in the OED with a quotation from a Usenet post from October 1999, made just over a year after the search engine itself launched. It remains to be seen if the verb Bing catches on in the same way, not least because Binged resembles a common spelling of the past tense of the verb binge – which might have what Steve Ballmer calls negative, unusual connotations.