We take the song for granted today, but someone had to write that tune. Though you may not recognize it, the tune of the alphabet song is based on the tune of a very common nursery rhyme: “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”. In the 1780s, Mozart originally composed the tune as a variation on a classic French nursery rhyme “Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman” (which means “Ah! Would I tell you, mother?”). Fifty years later, an American music publisher Charles Bradlee put the useful lyrics to that catchy tune: A, B, C, D… you know how it goes. In 1835, he copyrighted the song. The song’s legal title was “The A.B.C., a German air with variations for the flute with an easy accompaniment for the piano forte.” (Nursery rhymes of all stripes help young children learn the rules of language. Learn more here.)

Obviously, the rest is history. Today, the tune is standard for alphabet songs, not only the English alphabet, but also French and German.

Similarly, other languages have alphabet songs to help children learn and remember the written language. In Arabic, the alphabet song is also a child-friendly tune called “Alif Ba Ta Tsa”. Both Japanese and Chinese have poems that express all the characters in the language. In Japanese, a poem, “Iroha”, contains all the syllables of Japanese, called kana. A more common organization of the language, though, is the gojūon, which also has all the Japanese kanas. In Chinese, a poem called the “Thousand Character Classic” helps schoolchildren learn all the Chinese characters. Clearly, we all need alphabets and mnemonic devices to help us remember written language.

Do you still use the alphabet song regularly?

Before Jay-Z and Beyoncé submitted their application, two other people tried to trademark “Blue Ivy Carter.” However, the US Patent and Trademark Office said no because it is illegal to register a trademark with illegitimate affiliation with a celebrity. What does that mean? You cannot trademark someone else’s name or image without their explicit permission, particularly in the case of celebrities, so the other attempts to trademark “Blue Ivy Carter” were rejected.

Conversely, Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s application was approved; they now officially own the trademark of “Blue Ivy Carter.” Does this mean that you can’t name your baby Blue Ivy? Of course not. You could name your child any trademarked name: McDonald’s, Hilton, Versace. There’s a very pertinent detail to trademarks: when you trademark a word or phrase, it is limited to a certain category of goods or services. In this case, Jay-Z and Beyoncé registered their daughter’s name under the category of child or baby products. Even though you can’t start a clothing line called Versace because that would infringe on the copyright, you could start a restaurant or a line of hotels called Versace. This means even if a word is “trademarked” it is still more or less a normal word.

Back in 2004, the Supreme Court made an interesting interpretation of trademark law. In the case, one company, Lasting Impressions I Inc., sued a rival company for using copyrighted language. In this case, the rival, KP Permanent Make-Up Inc., used just one word – microcolors – that supposedly infringed on the copyright. Lasting Impressions claimed that customers would be confused, and they should maintain their right to that language. KP argued that the term was widely used before Lasting Impressions trademarked the word. The Supreme Court agreed with KP and said that the use of the trademarked word was covered under the doctrine of fair use. What’s fair use? Fair use is a tricky element of trademark law because it includes all the exceptions to the rules. If you want to quote a book, for example, it is covered under fair use, and the author cannot sue you. If you want to make a copy of a book and sell it, it is not covered under fair use. Fair use is one reason why we can discuss “Blue Ivy Carter” and use her name and not fear retribution from her loving parents. (If we said something bad about the baby that would be a libel issue, which is an entirely different discussion.) Trademarks do not interfere with our daily lives, in part, because of fair use.

Lastly, it’s important to keep in mind that trademarking something doesn’t mean that it completely stops being in the world. The US Patent and Trademark Office itself does not pursue copyright infringement suits. Rather, the owner of a trademark has legal permission to sue someone for copyright infringement.

What do you think of trademarking “Blue Ivy Carter”? Are trademark rules reasonable and relevant?

So, why do we care? Well, this software, called TheySay, uses something called corpora linguistics, which basically means taking a whole bunch of text (whether Dickens’ novels or Facebook posts) and analyzing what the words mean in relation to each other. This technology may be used to analyze language on an unprecedented scale. For example, one could gather all the public tweets on Twitter in a given month and use text-based analysis to measure the general sentiment of that time period. A group of mathematicians used a variation of this approach on a language-wide scale. Learn more here.

Consider how a tool like this could work like a heart monitor that measures your pulse, but instead of faster and slower, it would measure happier or sadder. As the mood changes, it can be correlated to a public event, like an election, the Super Bowl or the Grammys.

Last week, Steve Lohr at the New York Times discussed the growing amount and usefulness of immense collections of raw data.  As he put it, “…the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning.” Companies hope to use these developing technologies to predict and measure public health outbreaks or fluctuations in the housing market, among other applications.

TheySay wants to measure perception of a particular product or company to help businesses measure their reputations based on the immediate feedback that language analysis provides. As one of the professors behind the program told The Engineer: “We have a very large database of words annotated by hand along several dimensions for the emotional meaning they carry, and we also evaluate the grammatical context in which these words occur, taking account of the effects of negation and other constructs that change meaning. A word such as ‘progress’ is generally perceived as positive, but not when it is in a context such as ‘fail to progress’, or ‘little progress’.” Pretty cool, huh?

Do you think this software will be able to interpret human language? Share your thoughts.

Music undeniably has an impact on our emotions and can even evoke physiological reactions – like goose bumps and tears. Does this impact come from the lyrics or from the notes themselves? Psychologists have been trying to figure this out, and it turns out it’s the music, not the words. So if you’ve cried listening to Adele’s song “Someone Like You,” it’s not your fault. The Grammy-winning song has all of the signatures of emotionally provocative music.

In particular, Adele embellishes the song with unexpected notes called appoggiaturas, or grace notes. Appoggiatura means “a propping up.” Musically speaking, it is a note that is not essential to the harmony or the melody. The appoggiatura contrasts the melody and creates tension, according to musical psychologists. This tension is relieved when the singer returns to the melody and provides emotional relief to the listener.Then the tears start flowing.

For a more in-depth analysis of the “Anatomy of a Tear Jerker” see this article at the Wall Street Journal.

Medieval scribes spent all day, every day transcribing text. As they were going along, writing perfectly and quickly, the shape of the letters slowly changed to be more efficient. This transformed the alphabet during the Middle Ages. It even gave us capital and lowercase letters. Curious about why we have upper and lowercase letters in the first place? They are technically called majuscule and minuscule. Learn more here.

But why do some of the lowercase letters look so different from their capital equivalents? Most of the letters fit neatly together: C c, F f, J j, H h, L l, X x, etc. But some of them barely look related, like R and r.

Well, the contemporary English alphabet is a direct descendant of the Latin alphabet, which in turn inherited some characteristics from Greek. The Greek alphabet did have lowercase letters, and some of the modern English lowercase letters are directly related to their Greek equivalents. For example, both the uppercase and the lowercase letter A look very similar to the Greek letter Alpha.

But the Greek alphabet only had 24 letters, and the Latin alphabet had just 21. Obviously, we’ve toyed with them since then. The letter R, for instance, is related to the Greek letter, Rho, which looks like our letter P. (P is not related to this letter, but to the letter Pi, which you may remember from high school geometry). Anyway, back to the slippery letter R. In the Latin alphabet, the R acquired its modern uppercase shape: R. The lowercase r, though, was still figuring itself out.

Those medieval scribes tried to write as quickly and efficiently as possible.  They developed a lowercase version of the letter r that looked a lot like its uppercase equivalent, pictured here. It was called the r rotunda. When writing, the scribes would place that letter next to letters like o, b and p that already had the left staff of the capital letter R, so the lowercase r, then, would look just like its uppercase letter.

Obviously, though, we don’t still use a lowercase r that looks like that. At this same time, another lowercase r was competing with the r rotunda. Greek letters were often written in what we’d call cursive, with the end of one letter going into the beginning of the next. From 100 to 300 A.D., Latin scribes began writing Latin in a Greek style. It was called New Roman Cursive. The New Roman Cursive version of the r is very similar to the lowercase r with which we are familiar. This r looks like part of the lower staff of the capital R and can be easily distinguished from other letters and – most importantly – written quickly.

Are there other letters that you’d like to learn about?

Maybe you’ve heard of Pangaea – the theoretical supercontinent that existed 200–300 million years ago and consisted of all the landmasses pushed together. Coined by Alfred Wegener in 1927, “Pangaea“ means “entire earth” in Greek. Wegener’s theory of continental drift also suggested that Pangaea split into two sub-supercontinents, Gondwana and Laurasia. No, he wasn’t making these words up off the top of his head. Gondwana comes from Sanskrit meaning “forest of the Indians” and refers to the landmasses that became South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica. Laurasia became North America, Asia and Europe. The word Laurasia came from the name of the core of North America (Laurentia) and Eurasia.

The earth, though, hasn’t stopped moving. Geologists at Yale University predict that Asia and North America will join near the North Pole. Don’t worry – this will not happen in the foreseeable future. Continental drift is slow and steady, and the scientists say this particular shift will occur in 50–200 million years. They are proposing to call this future supercontinent “Amasia”. Learn more at the BBC.

What are continents made of? Cratons are the core of continents. They are the oldest and sturdiest part of landmasses, and their roots (yes, rocks have roots) descend many miles into the Earth’s crust.

How are continents defined? In World Geography, we learned about the seven continents of the world: Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, North America and South America. Some geologists quibble with the notion that there are seven continents. Perhaps Europe and Asia should actually be one continent (called Eurasia), or others claim, North and South America technically make one continent. However, those are not the prevailing beliefs. The word continent comes from the land phrase, “terra continens,” which meant “continuous land.” Continēnt literally meant “holding together.”

The names of the continents are contentious. Etymologists still haven’t pinned down the particular root for the word “Europe.” It shows up in Greek mythology in the form of a woman, Europa, who seduced Zeus, but its exact origin is uncertain. It has referred to what we know of as Europe, though, for a very long time. The word Asia comes from the Akkadian word “asus” which meant “to go out, to rise” in reference to the sun. So, Asia technically meant “the land where the sunrises.” From the perspective of Europe, Asia is in the direction of where the sun rises. Africa comes from the Latin name, Afri, which referred to people who lived in North Africa. It is unclear what “afri” meant.” Learn how the Americas were named here.

Australia and Antarctica both refer to the geographic positions of the continents in relation to Europe. Australia is derived from the Latin word australis, which meant “southern.” Antarctica simply means “opposite of the Arctic.”

How did the Yellow, Black and Red Seas get their names? Find out here.

Do you have a better name for the future continent? What is it?

In January, M. Keith Chen, an associate professor of economics at the School of Management at Yale University, published a working paper on his research about the effect of language on economic behavior. Chen zoomed in on one aspect of language: how we deal with time. Each language organizes and describes the future differently. Linguists call this distinction future-time-reference (FTR, for short). Some languages, like German, have a weak-FTR, which means that the distinction between today and tomorrow isn’t very concrete. In his paper, Chen gives the example that in German, you can say, “It rains tomorrow” whereas in English you have to say, “It will rain tomorrow.” English is a strong-FTR language because there are clear, constant grammatical distinctions between today and tomorrow.

Analyzing retirement savings’ patterns, along with health habits, Chen found that people who speak weak-FTR languages prepare more thoroughly for the future than people who speak strong-FTR languages. In fact, weak-FTR countries save, on average, 6% more of their GDP every year. They also smoke less, exercise more, and are less likely to be overweight.

Chen also analyzed the data accounting for variables like gender, age, and religion, to isolate language as the primary factor. Even in these analyses, people who spoke weak-FTR languages outperformed their strong-FTR peers.

Read Chen’s very academic and fascinating paper here.

This particular phenomenon is an example of linguistic relativity, or how languages affect how we think. We’ve discussed before how language affects how you see colors and perceive the world around you.

Further research along these lines hasn’t produced conclusive results, and linguists certainly have qualms with these socio-cultural extrapolations. From your experience, do particular languages seem to influence behavior, for better or worse? What are some examples? Share your thoughts with us, below.

Will Shortz: The English language may be the best language in the world to write puzzles in because, first of all, we have a huge vocabulary. Second, we often have many synonyms, many ways to express an idea. Another cool thing about English is the number of idioms. Then one of the great things is how spelling and pronunciation often don’t go together, so there are many ways to write clues that involve word play that are satisfying that you wouldn’t be able to do in other languages.

HW: So what do the best clues do? How do they operate on a semantic level?

WS: Well, a clue and its answers must be in the same part of speech and mean roughly the same thing. Usually the test on that is that you should be able to interchange a clue and its answer in a sentence and have the same meaning. That’s the basic rule. There are rare exceptions, but that’s basically it.

HW: You’ve said before that you try to avoid crosswordese. What exactly is that? And why exactly have you decided to avoid it?

WS: Crosswordese are the words that usually are from the depths of the unabridged dictionary that are very useful to crossword makers because they’re short and they’re full of vowels, but are rarely seen in everyday life. Classic examples are esne, which is an Anglo-Saxon slave, or anoe, it’s a Celebese ox from the Island of Celebes in Indonesia. Those two words, for example, used to appear in crosswords all the time. You could hardly go a week in the New York Times crossword without seeing one or both of those. Nowadays you almost never see them. Those are desperation-only answers because they’re not part of life. You know, crosswords should reflect life and the way people speak. It’s off-putting to encounter words that you don’t know and you don’t think have any purpose in your life. It’s not bad every once in a while to learn an unusual word; I like that. That’s part of crosswords. That’s part of their appeal. But it’s no fun to have words thrown at you that just feel stupid.

HW: Qs are pretty rare in crosswords in general because then they have to relate to so many other letters around them.

Will Shortz (Photo by Anthony Loew)

WS: Well, every letter in an American crossword has to cross another word in the other direction. That’s one of the rules of our crossword, not true of English crosswords, but that’s the rule in the United States, every letter has to appear both in a cross word and a down word. So if you have q in one word, it has to appear twice. Every once in a while, let’s say, I have the answer ano. It’s usually clued as “Spanish year.” That’s the basic meaning, but in Spanish it has a tilde and sometimes Spanish-speakers complain that the word año in our crosswords doesn’t have a tilde as it’s supposed to. I just say, the convention in American crosswords is that we don’t worry with accents and other diacritical marks. If you think about it, it would be really hard—you’d never be able to use ano if you have to cross it with another ñ with a tilde.

HW: I think that speaks to an interesting balance that you have to strike between the audience’s demand and the exigencies of a great puzzle, which can often butt heads.

WS: Yes, they do. There are at least four daily blogs about the New York Times crossword. I read three of them, and people are always criticizing the obscure words that appear in them and they’re really not that obscure, if you compare the words in the crosswords today to what they were thirty years ago. There’s much more obscurity in the old days. But, that said, there is still a little obscurity that comes in because it’s just really hard to avoid. It’s often impossible to avoid.

HW: What are some of the all time best words you’ve ever seen or used in a crossword puzzle?

WS: Wow—ha. Okay, let me think about that. I particularly like phrases, rather than words, but I like words that have unusual letter combinations, like kumquat. Kumquat has appeared twice in the Times crossword, and there’s a reason that it’s appeared only twice even though everyone knows it. It’s because the letter combination is so bizarre that it’s difficult to incorporate in a construction. I like words that are familiar to everybody, but that have unusual letters of the alphabet and that haven’t appeared often in crosswords.

HW: Other than table tennis, what are your hobbies? Are you an avid reader?

WS: I read a lot. Not so much books, but I’m online all the time. I read magazines, go to movies, travel a lot. Those are my big things besides table tennis.

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Will Shortz picks his favorite puzzles here.

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Read the first installment of our interview with Will Shortz here.

When someone uses words as a way to predict the future or just to gauge the mood of their day, it’s called bibliomancy. We are bibliomancy enthusiasts here at Dictionary.com, and always enjoy learning how others find personal significance in our Word of the Day picks.

In this Non-Sequitur comic, a couple attempts to use bibliomancy to name their new boat. We do not recommend relying on our words of the day for this or any other fateful decision. Another fan uses the words daily to make a new comic illustrating the word itself.

So thank you for making our daily words a part of your life. Do you use our words of the day in a creative way? Send us your examples and maybe we can highlight them in a future post.

We originally published this blog in June 2010, but in honor of the Super Bowl, we are revisiting the subject.

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If you’re reading this in the U.S. or Canada, then maybe you love soccer. If you’re reading this pretty much anywhere else, then perhaps you love football.

One person’s idea of a cute habit is responsible for the most popular sport in the world having two names.

One person’s idea took off so wildly that it dictates what millions of people call the game being played at the Super Bowl.

Let’s start in England in the 19th century. Kids played their own versions of football however they felt like it. A bunch of private schools got together to standardize the rules, which of course led to lots of arguing. The arguments gave birth to two games: Rugby football (named after a school called Rugby) and Association football, after the Football Association.

Enter a fellow named Charles Wreford-Brown, one of Association football’s early heroes. Brown was fond of a slang fad called an Oxford-er (like a vintage version of today’s “izzle” craze.) It works like this: you shorten a word and add “-er” on the end. Breakfast becomes “brekker.” Rugby is “rugger.”

Association football was called “footer”, but Brown had a different idea. He took the word Association, chopped off the A, sliced off the –iation from sociation and called it “soccer” instead. Weird, but true. It may not be the most logical name in the history of sports, but his influence is one of the reasons we don’t have footer leagues today. And if we did play footer instead of soccer, what would we call playing footsy?

What exactly does hike, as in “hut, hut, hike” mean? Find out.

Since American football (based on rugby) had already taken off by the time Association football became popular in the U.S., soccer stuck. The truth is, however, that soccer wasn’t universally accepted over football in the U.S. for a long time. The governing body for soccer in the U.S. was called the United States Soccer Football Association until 1974.