This past week saw Barack Obama clinch the Democratic presidential nomination, with the commitments of undecided "superdelegates" putting him over the top. Even though the term superdelegate has been kicking around Democratic circles since 1981, the word has achieved new prominence this year, when all eyes were on these unpledged party leaders to break the primary deadlock between Obama and Hillary Clinton. We're less than halfway through 2008, but superdelegate has already emerged as a formidable candidate for Word of the Year.Continue reading...
A hearty congratulations from all of us here at the Visual Thesaurus to Sameer Mishra, winner of the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee! Sameer, a 13-year-old from West Lafayette, Indiana, triumphed over his competitors by correctly spelling a very fitting word in the final round: guerdon, meaning "reward or payment." His reward was $35,000 in cash and various other prizes. The second-place finisher, Sidharth Chand of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, performed admirably on words like introuvable ("impossible to find"), but he eventually erred in spelling prosopopoeia, a personifying figure of speech.Continue reading...