Happy D.C. Natives Day! Enjoy the sounds, tastes, sights, and language of the city with quintessential D.C. words shared by visitors in our Words Matter gallery, like “jhi,” “Go-Go,” “mumbo,” and “metro.” And to all the D.C. natives out there — what words sound like home to you?

Can you pick the lie out of this lineup? Forensic linguists have found that when people lie, they tend to use more verbs, especially modals or auxiliary verbs like “must” and “have.” That string of three verbs in “the dog must have eaten my homework” is the giveaway.

Happy birthday to Sabrina Carpenter! In her hit “Manchild,” Carpenter uses songwriting techniques like alliteration, assonance, double entendre, and compound rhyme to make lyrics about a frustrating situationship an absolute joy to sing along to.

You know that feeling you get when you discover a perfect word you never knew existed? Meet “kuchisabishii” (Japanese 口寂しい). Literally “lonely mouth,” it describes those moments when “you’re not hungry but your mouth is lonely so you eat anyway.” We’ve all been there…and now you have a word for it!

Grateful to be a museum for polyglots, orators, music enthusiasts, bibliophiles, and everyone who loves words! #Hallelujah #MuseumLoversDay

Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day! It’s one of our favorite annual traditions at Planet Word, one that we’ve been observing since before the museum opened. If you’re in our neighborhood today, look out for Planet Word team members in Franklin Park around lunchtime, giving out pocket-sized poems!

#OnThisDay in 1852, Peter Roget published the first edition of his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases — and gave writers everywhere a way to find the right (precise, correct, exact) word.

Every year, the internet rediscovers its favorite misheard lyric. Linguists have a word for that: a mondegreen. But the reason “me” sounds like “May” in that NSYNC line isn’t random — it’s a quirk of how English vowels behave in song. https://planetwordmuseum.org/whats-in-a-meme-its-gonna-be-may/

Ever noticed how a tiny shift in stress can completely change a word’s meaning? In tonal languages, like Mandarin Chinese, words change meaning depending on pitch, but in English, syllable stress can determine a word’s meaning or even part of speech!

Happy Earth Day! Like rain, thoughtful language can nurture ideas, spark action, and help grow a better future for us and our planet. What words have helped you flourish?

Nowadays, people use “weird” — from Old English wyrd (“fate”) — to describe strange behavior. But in Shakespeare’s time, the word was tied to the Fates. 18th and 19th c. performances of Macbeth made the “weird sisters” eerie, shifting “weird” toward its modern meaning: strange and uncanny.