Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game based on Google searches, or at least what Google thinks you’re searching. For example, what do Elmo, pink, and plant all have in common? Google suggests them, in that order, after you’ve entered the...
Databases like the Google Books Corpus can also be used to follow text over time. For example, as the women’s suffrage movement grew around 1910, words relating to women’s rights grew in popularity and frequency of usage. This is part of...
What in the Sam Hill?! It's another newsletter from A Way with Words. Oh, man, when we have fun on the air, we have it in spades, buckets, and buttloads. This past weekend we took a quick look at whether old-fashioned fairy tales are too...
triple n.— «Who is Bill Clinton’s wife? What’s the capital city of Oregon? What is Britney Spears’ mother’s name? The answers to these and other factual questions are now displayed above natural search results in Google and the...
Greetings, wanderers, and welcome home. This past weekend on A Way with Words we wrestled with "commentate," "tie me over" vs. "tide me over," long words, and "biweekly" vs. "semiweekly." We also...