supertaxa
n.— «Ward believes rats and snakes belong in the category known as “supertaxa,” groups of organisms that create many new species while having a relatively low extinction rate.» —“King rat and the brilliant squibbon” by Miguel Llanos MSNBC May 2, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
After hearing our conversation about how dictionaries decide on a preferred pronunciation, and specifically about how to pronounce aioli, Vern from San Diego, California, wrote to say that a friend once made fun of him for pronouncing grimace with a...