The best part of "Damp Squid," a series of lexicographic essays by Jeremy Butterfield, isn't the oddball title but the computer that inspired it. The Oxford English Corpus, a database of more than 2 ...

I recently made a reservation on American Airlines and noticed that my record locator was a six-character alphabetic code. This automatically generated code reminded me of a funny story regarding ...

We invite you to dive in and explore a database of words that appeared prominently in the print history of Scientific American. Below, each year of that historyis represented by a single word, which ...

Don’t open that Word file attached to your e-mail; it might contain malware. And don’t click on that e-mail or Web site links from strangers. Heck, don’t even open Word e-mail attachments from trusted ...