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Hello, I'm Nicole Holiday, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

And I'm Ben Zimmer, a language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

And this is spectacular vernacular, a podcast where we not only explore language.

We also play with it. This week, our guest is Josh Wardle, a software engineer and the man behind the massively popular new online game Wordal.

And later, we'll try to sample this in our with a brand new Wordplay puzzle.

Hey, Ben, it's great to see you again. I know it's been a crazy few weeks for you.

Last time I saw you, you were presiding over the American dialect societies and you'll

Word of the Year vote. Yes, Wode was a fun time. We held it virtually.

For the second year, we had to go virtual. But we got a very nice online attendance for our Word of the Year vote.

You know, we actually really kind of expand our tech capacities to let everybody in who wanted to be there.

But it was I think a good experience all at all.

Yeah, people were like busting down the virtual door to get into Wode.

It was very exciting. And on the last spectacular vernacular, we spoke with Peter Sokolowski of Maryam Webster and Fuehannemick Fiercen of the OED about their dictionary's respective words of the year.

William Webster chose vaccine and the OED chose Vax. But what did the linguists and dialect society members go with?

Well, the ADS, American dialect society almost went for Vax. That came in second, but the overall winner was insurrection.

So yeah, that was an interesting choice. One reason that it's interesting is because I noticed that when we get together to pick these words of the year, often there's a kind of a

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