Have you ever encountered a bloat of hippos or a charm of finches? This entertaining website, created by researcher and educator Melissa Kaplan, provides various descriptive terms for an extensive list of animals. Part 1 of the site contains plurals, collective nouns, and words for sounds, gender, and offspring. For example, a female kangaroo is a flyer, and a young swan is cygnet. Part 2 offers...

While the phrase "never say never" may make some think of a certain suave British spy of the silver screen, to wordsmiths this is a thoroughly noxious example of an oxymoron. Strictly speaking, an oxymoron is a literary figure of speech in which opposite or contradictory words, terms, phrases or ideas are combined to create a rhetorical effect by paradoxical means. For those with a budding love of...

Words are used as invectives, toasts, and tirades, among other forms of human expression. As a type of artistic experiment, Jonathan Harris of Flaming Toast Productions decided to create this engaging website that documents the 86,000 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Nay-sayers beware: This is no simple listing of the words, contained within a mundane series of...