In the month leading up to 9th, October there was a 500% increase in the number of people looking up the word recycle.

We sometimes get spikes in look-ups, and the causes can be varied. Sometimes, people are responding to items in the news and are looking up key words from a news story. On other occasions, it looks as though everyone at school in a certain country has been given the same project for homework.

In this case, I suspect a project. I had an email from someone asking if she could reproduce our definition of recycle in her coursework. Rather than write a new definition, why not recycle an existing one?

One of the most looked up words in the last week is muppet. Our dictionary entry says it’s an insulting word for someone who behaves in a stupid way, but it’s only very mildly insulting, and is usually said in a friendly way. I couldn’t think of any reason why the term should suddenly become so interesting to so many people.

Nearly all the look-ups were on Saturday 24th. A lot of us were outdoors trying to enjoy the Indian summer we’re having in the UK, but if we’d stayed in and logged on, we might have seen that the Google Doodle that day featured the Muppets to celebrate what would have been the 75th birthday of the animator and creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson.

Last week, we had twice as many visits from South Korea as we had the week before. The reason is probably that everyone was too busy celebrating Chuseok, a festival that is sometimes associated with the Harvest Moon. This year, Chuseok fell on 12 September.

A harvest moon is the full moon that comes nearest the autumn equinox, and often seems larger than usual. In the past, it was considered useful because it allowed farmers to stay out in the fields after sunset thanks to the extra light from the moon.

Now that the equinox has happened, the nights in the northern hemisphere are longer than the days, and we say that the nights are drawing in.

Thursday was a big day for the USA and Russia. The event probably went unnoticed by most of the population in both countries, but in New Zealand, the USA took on Russia in a group match of the Rugby World Cup.

Meanwhile, on macmillandictionary.com, ten times more people looked up the word bear than the word eagle.

The connection? The teams all have a nickname, and Thursday’s match was between the US Eagles and the Russian Bears. Despite a crushing win for the bears over the eagles on the dictionary look-ups, on the rugby pitch it was the Eagles who scored twice as many points as the Bears, and ran out winners by 13 points to six.

Another month has gone by, and what have been the most searched for words on Macmillan English Dictionary in August?

Near the top of the list is the word entrepreneur. Over half the searches for this word came from Brazil, a BRIC country. One of the key features of the BRICs is rapid economic growth, and entrepreneurship is reckoned to play a big part in that.

But higher up the list is the word goal – something Brazilian footballers have been scoring with flair, élan and panache  for many years. One of the great Brazilian goalscorers of all time was the inimitable Pelé. Nothing to do with language – but enjoy…

Our brief dip into local searches now focuses on Russia – and moves into the realms of idiom, phrasal verbs, and set expressions.

Idioms are always a popular choice with language learners, with students often wanting to draw direct comparisons between the English expressions and phrases in their own language.

The top search term over recent weeks has been the following phrase, often used in a political context:

‘to throw your weight behind sth’

Would this translate exactly into Russian and carry the same meaning? Or indeed – any other language?

What about these ones below? (again, featuring high on the Russian local look-up ladder)

‘to get on like a house on fire’

‘at someone’s whim‘

‘feel-good factor’

And no top five ‘look-ups’ would be complete without a phrasal verb:

‘allow for’

Whilst these weekly ‘Google Analytics’ updates are providing interesting insights into local searches, we do have to allow for a small percentage of error…

So, moving on from Germany to India this week.

I took a look at the top 5 most sought-after words from India in the last week, and was mildly surprised to see that a couple of them were, in fact, Indian English.

The word prepone is not commonly used in English outside India, but I like it. Why did we get rid of it in the UK, I have to ask myself, and opt for the clunky bring the date forward?

Similarly, wheatish is a word I’d not come across before, and once I’d looked up the meaning, I realised why. The British population, on the whole, isn’t blessed with this sort of complexion: a more apt description might be chalkish (which I’ve just coined).

Anyway, three other popular search terms from India here for you:
reckon
burgeoning
grinch

Make what you may of these.

I thought it might be interesting to give this post a more local flavour over the next few weeks, and explore which words are causing grief at a local level.

So let’s kick off with Germany. Thanks to our partnership with the giant bilingual dictionary Leo, a lot of users come through to us for further clarification on specific words – but which ones exactly?

Well, the top five would suggest that we’ve got users seeking much more than a straightforward definition, but pronunciation and spelling advice as well:

albeit
either
liability
colleague
hypothesis

Typically tricky words to spell, and not immediately obvious as to their pronunciations. However, these searches are pretty academic in nature, so I’d say our German audience are generally advanced users of English, tertiary-level students – perhaps looking for confirmation on a spelling for a thesis?

That’s my hypothesis anyway, but then I’m no Sherlock.

Let’s see what India throws up next week.

This week, many of you have been searching the Macmillan Dictionary for the word acquaintance. I’m not sure how successful you will have been initially, because this word was often typed in without the first ‘c’. I can see how easy it is to make this mistake. In English, the letters ‘qu’ make the phonetic sound kw, so that first ‘c’ seems redundant.

Acquaintance, in the sense of someone you don’t know that well, is a fairly formal word these days and young people tend to use words like friend or mate instead (the latter is used in British English).  Many classic works of English literature, from the 19th and early 20th centuries in particular include references to acquaintance. In fact some of the more famous quotations about acquaintances were coined around this time, such as:

“Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.”
Ambrose Bierce
“We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.”
Logan Pearsall Smith

We should perhaps take a longer view about our own acquaintances though, after all:

“The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.”
Logan Pearsall Smith

In this post (my second on ‘words on your mind’), I see that you have all been out having a great time without me again. You gave yourselves away by so many of you searching for the term fun-filled in Macmillan Dictionary recently. Fun-filled is a lovely compound adjective used to describe something that is great fun pretty much all the time, or that everything about it is fun, and it refers most commonly to an experience or an object, rather than a person. You might say, for instance, ‘We had a totally fun-filled time on holiday last week’, or ‘rounders is a fun-filled game for all the family’. You can also say fun-packed, eg ‘I had a totally fun-packed day getting to meet all my new colleagues’. Fun-packed can also be used ironically, like in this sentence:

Our night out was not exactly fun-packed, the fire-alarm went off at the pub and we all had to go and stand outside in the rain.

So I wish you all a fun-filled week and a fun-packed weekend when it comes and I don’t mean that ironically, honest!