linguistics

Our most-read stories of the year featured photographer Vivian Maier, underwater caves in the Yucatán Peninsula, auroras and more.

Ten Top Smithsonian Stories of 2024, From a Mysterious Underground Chamber to Dazzling Auroras

The magazine's most-read articles of the year included a close-up look at the adorable yet venomous pygmy slow loris, a profile of a little-known 20th-century street photographer and a majestic journey with divers into Mexico’s underwater caves

Merriam-Webster has been printing English dictionaries since 1831.

'Polarization' Is Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2024

The winning word beat out finalists such as "demure," "pander," "totality," "fortnight," "allision" and "democracy"

"Brain rot," which is now linked to social media overload, first appeared in Henry David Thoreau's Walden in 1854.

'Brain Rot,' the Scourge of the Chronically Online, Becomes Oxford's 2024 Word of the Year

The term refers to "the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state" that's linked to spending extensive stretches of time scrolling through low-quality content

Jools Lebron's viral social media video about being "very demure, very mindful" while getting ready for work led to a massive increase in the use of the word "demure."

'Demure' Is Dictionary.com's Word of the Year for 2024

The term's popularity skyrocketed after content creator Jools Lebron used it in a now-viral TikTok video, in which she described being "very demure, very mindful"

The clay cylinders were found in a tomb containing six skeletons.

Archaeologists Say These Mysterious Markings Could Be the World's Oldest Known Alphabetic Writing

Found etched into clay cylinders in Syria, the strange symbols date to around 2400 B.C.E.—500 years before other known alphabetic scripts

The origins of the word "OK" have long been a subject of scholarly debate.

How One Man Discovered the Obscure Origins of the Word 'OK'

From Civil War biscuits to a Haitian port town, theories about the word's beginnings abounded

Two unidentified Gullah Geechee women photographed by Lorenzo Dow Turner in the early 1930s

How the Memory of a Song Reunited Two Women Separated by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

In 1990, scholars found a Sierra Leonean woman who remembered a nearly identical version of a tune passed down by a Georgia woman’s enslaved ancestors

Accents center on the pronunciation of words, while dialects encompass pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Here, the subjects of Grant Wood's American Gothic channel speaking styles popular in California and New York.

A Brief History of the United States' Accents and Dialects

Migration patterns, cultural ties, geographic regions and class differences all shape speaking patterns

This year, lookups on Dictionary.com increased for A.I.-related words, including "generative A.I.,” “GPT” and “chatbot.”

'Hallucinate' Is Dictionary.com's Word of the Year for 2023

In the context of artificial intelligence, the word means "to produce false information" and "present it as if true"

Rizz is unusual, in that it's an abbreviated version of the word "charisma" that comes from the middle of the word.

‘Rizz’ Is Oxford’s 2023 Word of the Year

The word means “style, charm or attractiveness” or “the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner"

Advances in technology are making altering or faking content increasingly easier.

Merriam-Webster's 2023 Word of the Year Is 'Authentic'

As technology's ability to manipulate reality improves, we're all searching for the truth

The letter “x” often symbolizes something unknown, with an air of mystery that can be appealing.

A Brief History of the Letter 'X,' From Algebra to X-Mas to Elon Musk

A math historian explores how "x" came to stand in for an unknown quantity

Dictionary.com regularly adds new words with staying power to its online listings.

Dictionary.com Adds More Than 300 New Words

Additions like “digital nomad,” “anti-fat” and “liminal space” reflect the dynamic nature of the English language

Historian John Rice Irwin, linguist Carl Croneberg and historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

Three Pioneering Scholars Who Died This Year

They believed that the stories of marginalized communities were worth chronicling

To select a winner, Oxford editors track trending words and phrases throughout the calendar year.

'Goblin Mode' Is Oxford's 2022 Word of the Year

The term describes behavior that's "unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy"

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, a film adaptation of the 1938 play Gas Light

'Gaslighting' Is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year

Searches for the term, defined as the "practice of grossly misleading someone," skyrocketed in 2022

“The first people to look at the Rosetta Stone thought it would take two weeks to decipher,” says Edward Dolnick, author of The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone. “It ended up taking 20 years.”

Two Hundred Years Ago, the Rosetta Stone Unlocked the Secrets of Ancient Egypt

French scholar Jean-François Champollion announced his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs on September 27, 1822

Over the past century, archaeologists have uncovered more than 1,600 Proto-Elamite inscriptions, but only about 43 in Linear Elamite, scattered widely across Iran.

Have Scholars Finally Deciphered a Mysterious Ancient Script?

Linear Elamite, a writing system used in what is now Iran, may reveal the secrets of a little-known kingdom bordering Sumer

A meeting of the Soviet Republics’ Esperanto Union, held in Moscow in 1931

Why Hitler and Stalin Hated Esperanto, the 135-Year-Old Language of Peace

Jewish doctor L.L. Zamenhof created Esperanto as a way for diverse groups to easily communicate

Early Etruscans had advanced knowledge of art, farming and metallurgy, leading some historians to believe the civilization originated elsewhere before settling in what is now Italy. DNA analysis shows they were actually locals.

Where Did the Ancient Etruscans Come From?

A new DNA analysis suggests the enigmatic civilization was native to the Italian Peninsula

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