Search monitor: what were your top ODO lookups in January?

As part of our occasional search monitor series, here’s a clickable word cloud displaying about 350 of your most-viewed words in Oxford Dictionaries Online during January 2011.

It brightened up our day no end (in fact, we were even a little discombobulated) to see that vomitorium had emerged at the top of the pile for January! When we dug a little deeper, we discovered that this was mainly because the ODO entry is linked from a couple of Wikipedia articles.  Other words featuring strongly were a little more prosaic: as with October’s search trends, they show that most of you, quite reasonably, are interested in either definitions (e.g. democracy, culture, society) or spellings (e.g. complement, affect, definitely). However, the appearance of panjandrum at number 89 suggests that some of you are (like us) pure word geeks.

Hover over the words to find out more (you might even find a few surprises along the lines of vomitorium …), click to see the full dictionary entries, or compare with October’s monitor to spot the differences between the two months.

Posted on: February 15 2011 | Categories: Interactive features | Tags: affect, search monitor, tag cloud, vomitorium