The missing word is fat. This word is obviously so offensive to their customers that they decided to just remove it, despite the resulting label making no sense.
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 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.
In this article about the history of the word nauseous, I was happy to be introduced to the idea of a skunked term:
The problem now, however, is that sufficient numbers of prescriptivists disparage the “affected with nausea” meaning, while those who use the word in that manner may be unfamiliar with the traditional “causing nausea” meaning. In other words, it has become a skunked term, as Bryan Garner calls it in his Modern American Usage: either way you use it, somebody is probably going to be unhappy.
Other examples include the words nonplussed, bemused, and enormity.
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