the buzz log

Philologists, rejoice. Wordsmiths worked themselves up in a lexical lather after Merriam-Webster recently added more than 100 new words. Now their wordly obsessions can reach a new level with Scrabble's new online game.

Or will they? Hold your Qs and Js... isn't there already a fabulous, albeit contentious, version made popular by Facebook? After all, Scrabulous probably spurred the leap in "scrabble dictionary" searches, about double what they were compared to this same time last year.

Some observers thinks the official Scrabble version is too North American-centric and comes too late. Will words fail them, or could this version drag high-stakes, tile-loving spellers into social networking? Either way, wordiness wins.

Filed under: Words, Wordplay, Games, Spelling, Dictionaries

Carmen Electra

What is hot, exactly? We toss the word around so liberally here at the Buzz, it risks losing all meaning. In fact, the way we incessantly babble "that's hot," we might be mistaken for dimwitted devotees of The Simple Life. Airheaded heiresses aside, a topic's "hotness" is directly correlated to its buzz-worthiness, and recently we noticed a different, more direct heat seeping into our data. So we decided to face the fire and dive headlong into "hot" searches. We wanted to investigate the people who had the word "hot" appended to their name in the Search box. Sadly, "wilford brimley hot" didn't make the cut, but here are the hottest of the hot according to the Search thermostat...

Filed under: Actors, Celebrities, Wordplay, So Hott