February 2010

January Top Twenty

January saw vocabulary curiosity sparked by the biggest movie ever (Avatar) and the most popular social networking Web site (Facebook). The word avatar was among the most looked-up words for the whole month, and Facebook's fun photo game of find-your-celebrity-lookalike brought doppelganger (it's the Word History topic of the month) into the top twenty.

  1. affect
  2. avatar
  3. effect
  4. rhetoric
  5. cynical
  6. eclectic
  7. ambiguous
  8. albeit
  9. pretentious
  10. hypocrite
 
  1. egregious
  2. facetious
  3. integrity
  4. didactic
  5. endeavor
  6. whether
  7. love
  8. complement
  9. doppelganger
  10. contingent

We see many perennials on this list, and affect and effect in particular seem to be getting even more attention these days, which may be a consequence of a popular online video of a Merriam-Webster editor presenting the correct usage of these words.


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