WordLo

The world of technology is shaping the English language, with innovative advances reflected in new terms.

Of course the explosion of social media has accelerated the creation of new words as different cultures and languages interact.

People are writing much more than we used to. The users of online social media produce an extraordinary amount of text each day. This increased use of electronic communication has given us new language forms and expressions largely driven by operational issues and a need to compensate for lack of non-verbal communication. 
Twitter and other social media offer records of language mutating in real time and space: an immense resource that can offer linguists the opportunity to explore how our words and phrases are changing.

Twitter claims that around 340 million tweets are sent every day. Following someone on Twitter, it is possible to see a word at the moment of its coinage. Because tweets tend to be rather informal, there are a lot of types of creative usa…

Il processo di istituzionalizzazione di un nuovo termine avviene secondo le seguenti fasi:
Frequenza. Un neologismo può iniziare a essere usato con crescente ricorrenza. Si può osservare un suo picco e un declino della forma preesistente. Possono verificarsi improvvisi cambiamenti nella frequenza. La stabilità nel grado di occorrenza osservato o una recessione della stessa dopo un picco può indicare la fine del processo di istituzionalizzazione. Inoltre, bisogna osservare anche la relazione tra la frequenza con la quale una parola appare in certi testi e la frequenza totale di una parola. La prima viene definita text frequency e la seconda total frequency. Il rapporto tra i due valori può indicare il grado di istituzionalizzazione del termine. Tipologia di testi e le varietà in generale. La presenza di un termine in differenti tipi di testi suggerisce il grado della sua istituzionalizzazione. Se un termine è usato solo in certi contesti sociali o geografici, è probabile che il suo grad…

The Newspaper archive goes back to 1759, with 58.1 million newspaper pages. If only one in 100 of those pages had a neologism on it, it would be an entire other OED. That's 500,000 more words. Not even talking about magazines. Not talking about blogs.
Of course the explosion of social media over the last couple of decades has intensified and accelerated the creation of new words and phrases.

So where will language take us in the future? We just don’t know and it is absolutely impossible for us to guess.

Kerry Maxwell(BuzzWord author @MAcMillan) and Rita Temmerman (professor in applied linguistics (terminology) at Erasmushogeschool Brussels) will try to give us answers to the previous questions.

This will be the topic for the next conference organized by TermCoord (Terminology Coordination of the European Parliament): “Neologisms in the Digital Age”.

In recent weeks I have found myself really obsessed with searching for a one stop stop for terminology search and dictionary/thesaurus lookups. 
I acknowledge that we already have a wealth of tools at our disposal and I am simply glad that we have access to all these online research resources which weren't around 20 years ago. Even if the few seconds or minutes required switching from one site to another don't bother us, I’m realizing that what we want is to search a range of resources without visiting individual websites.

So far the tool that better performs this function seems to be Memidex.
Memidex is a free online dictionary and thesaurus with a simple interface, complete inflections, auto-suggest, adult-filtering, frequent updates, a browsable index, support for mobile devices, and millions of external reference links for definitions, audio, and etymology.   The original Memidex database was derived from the high-quality WordNet® database developed by Princeton Universit…

I was reading the article “Dictionaries are not democratic” and I loved it because I completely disagree with J. Green’s view causing me to write this post to reject all his points.
Jonathon Green fails to realise one very important thing: it is the users of language that determine the definitions of words, not lexicographers.Language is fluid, lexicographers just record the up of a point of a term.

Dog-eared dictionaries and old e-dictionaries were not democratic, but the truth is actually the opposite: the internet and search engines enables us to search the corpus for ourselves, to observe any particular word, collocation, or phrase in context, and this is often a better method than the dictionary. 

Moreover, I find it revolutionary, and democratic that people, word lovers like me, are dedicating themselves to recording, forming and promoting neologisms. In the past years, since I opened this blog, I have seen an impressive number of websites and blogs devoted to neologisms. Just tak…

Skeuomorphism: derived from the Greek words "Skeuos", meaning vessel or tool, and "morph", meaning shape. A skeuomorph is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, a “derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.” 

The term can apply to either a physical or digital creation. In other words, it means to replicate the form and material qualities of something that are no longer inherently necessary, all with the objective of making new designs “look comfortably old and familiar,” Nicholas Gessler writes in “Skeuomorphs and Cultural Algorithms.” When applied to UI, the logic here is that it will make the interface more intuitive and usable, as the user will understand how it functions based on their knowledge of the analog object it is replicating.

Source: Can We Please Move Past Apple’s Silly, Faux-Real UIs?

Word Cloud: A Film Inspired by the Visual Thesaurus.

For a word lover there is nothing better than seeing the gentle explosions of words!!

More info: http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/blogexcerpts/word-cloud-a-film-inspired-by-the-visual-thesaurus/