Don’t look now… But sometime very soon, a word that probably never knew nor loved is about to become extinct.  Every year, hundreds of words fade forever from English parlance.  Friends, you have been asked to save the whales and save the planet.  Today, the iBraryGuy team is joining with the awesome folks at Oxford Press to ask you to SAVE THE WORDS!

Save the Words is both an interesting initiative and really cool site from the folks that bring us the venerable Oxford Dictionary line up.  Fun and informative, it challenges users to adopt an endangered word and make it part of their usage.  The idea is to keep that word from disappearing forever.  How serious is the extinction of words, you may wonder.  Well according to Oxford Press, only 7,000 words now account for over 90% of what we communicate on a daily basis!  What is happening to the rest of the millions of words in the English language?  Other than simply taking up space within the crammed pages of the biggest, most comprehensive dictionaries, they are fading forever into obscurity.

Save the Words invites you to adopt one of these words and stem the tide of our dying language.  The site is loaded with some of the most obscure and often difficult to pronounce words we have ever seen.  Half the fun was just trying to say them!  We could have spent hours scrolling them all.  Each word is accompanied by its definition and a sample usage sentence.  Using Save the Words, you actually sign a pledge to adopt and make use of the word you choose.  And it is FREE!  When you adopt word, you get a certificate of adoption and the option to buy a t-shirt with a picture of new bundle of linguistic love on it.  🙂

In the months to come, we here at iBraryGuy are going to give a little boost to Save the Words by featuring an endangered word weekly.  We hope that before you bring a new word into existence, you will consider one of these orphaned words for adoption.  That’s right.  You heard it here.  Why not make word adoption, your first option.

Happy Friday!

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Photo of John DiGilio John DiGilio

As an information professional and visionary, John DiGilio has over 20 years of large law firm library and legal information vendor experience. He has proudly been affiliated with some of the largest law firms and information vendors in the industry. An award winning…

As an information professional and visionary, John DiGilio has over 20 years of large law firm library and legal information vendor experience. He has proudly been affiliated with some of the largest law firms and information vendors in the industry. An award winning writer and popular speaker, John believes in the value of information and the power it can bring when harnessed wisely and efficiently.

John is the Firmwide Director of Library Services for Sidley Austin LLP. He has written for numerous regional and national publications as well as taught college and graduate courses in such topics as business ethics, e-commerce, fair employment practices, research methodology and business law.