These are the top dictionary words searched at colleges across the country

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published 25 March 2015

At Villanova they want to know about autonomy, and at Stanford they're looking up blithe. This interactive map from Dictionary.com shows the most popular word lookups from a range of colleges across the country.

South Carolina: Sociopath

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Kentucky: Academia

UCLA: Egregious

Wichita State: Serendipity

Ohio State: Bold

NYU: Courtesy

Alabama: Maelstrom

Michele Turner, CEO of Dictionary.com, explains that "while many searches from college students look at words you'd expect to see for homework or research, such as effect and affect, we saw vastly different searches from students once we drilled down on specific areas of the country. This shows that the issues affecting each campus are very different."

Kind of makes you wonder what's going on at Boise State (cauliflower) and the University of Wyoming (gag).

Arika Okrent is editor-at-large at TheWeek.com and a frequent contributor to Mental Floss. She is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, a history of the attempt to build a better language. She holds a doctorate in linguistics and a first-level certification in Klingon. Follow her on Twitter.