Latest articles by Arika Okrent
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15 less-than-inspirational quotes from a book of moral advice
feature Reaching for the stars probably isn't the most practical advice after all...
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The Klout score of 1903: A statistical study of eminent men
feature How do you measure the influence of important people?
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11 baby-naming trends of the past
feature The whole cities-as-names thing goes back way farther than you think
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11 spam comments that look like drunk thesauruses
feature Nothing is certain but death, taxes, and spam comments on your blog
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7 ways we could tell that AP tweet was a fake
feature Take out your red pens, folks
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What your Facebook updates say about your age
feature By analyzing Facebook posts, a new study uncovers which words best distinguish age groups from each other
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The first words of 11 famous people
feature You'll never guess whose first words were "Don't do that"
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Fun with The Great Language Game
feature How's your Tagalog?
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The world's greatest alphabet
feature Happy belated Hangul Day!
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10 viral hits (from the 19th century)
feature Researchers analyzed 1.6 billion words from 41,829 issues of 132 newspapers in the period covering 1830 to 1860. This is what they found.
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17 words that describe themselves
feature Autological words are a self-centered, self-referential bunch
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How many spaces should there be at the end of a sentence?
feature Grammar nerds, sharpen your swords!
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12 things made collectible thanks to spelling errors
feature When "oops" turns into opportunity
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Is Faulkner's 'as I lay dying' grammatically incorrect?
feature Musician Sufjan Stevens has sparked a controversy with his open letter to Miley Cyrus
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12 onomatopoeias from around the world
feature Chik chik pok pok is the sound of a train in Korean. Ghrutu ghrutu is pig grunting in Georgian. And more!
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Why are pound and ounce abbreviated as 'lb' and 'oz'?
feature Abbreviations are usually self-explanatory. How come these two aren't?
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3 fascinating facts about English's most adorable suffix, -ling
feature Surely you've heard of ducklings. But what about viperlings, frumberdlings, and deathlings?
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16 reasons why putting 'twerk' in the dictionary is no big deal
feature Miley Cyrus' twerking was awful. The word's inclusion in the dictionary? Not so much.
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22 songs that write themselves, from the Songwriter's Rhyming Dictionary
feature "Mildewy, St. Louis, chop suey" — it just needs a tune!
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14 fascinating language facts from the U.S. Census bureau
feature Americans speak more than 300 languages
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14 Swedish words that conflict with the Ikea products they name
feature Some of these make absolutely no sense
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35 classy slang terms for naughty bits from the past 600 years
feature Your vulgar vocabulary can now span centuries
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How to do an Australian accent
feature As explained by, well, Australians
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Don't Ask, Don't Tell: The end of a policy, the beginning of an idiom
feature It's been two years since the repeal of the policy, but the phrase seems here to stay
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