Grammar Girl here. I'm Inyaan Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today,

we're going to talk about splitting what a fascinating word gender is and about all

tricky things to know about capitalizing words in headlines and titles. Splitting squirrels

have taken over the internet the last couple of weeks as temperatures soar, the poor little

beasts are splaying out flat on the ground to try to cool off. And squirrels aren't the

only animals that do it. Corgis seem to be particularly known for splitting. They are

adorable little splutters, but all kinds of animals do it. I've seen pictures of

splitting bears, cats, rabbits, and pigs, for example. I've also seen dog people call it dog

frogging and frog dogging because it kind of looks like the way frogs sit with their legs

all spread out. And the Washington Post reports that it's more commonly called pancaking in

Britain. So multiple people have asked me about the word

splut. It sounds hilarious and it's shown up in such serious and authoritative places

as posts from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and articles from the

Washington Post and the Guardian. So what's up with that? Is it actually a real word?

Well, it's not a word you'll find in biology journals. I looked, biologists sometimes call

it heat dumping. And you won't find it in most official places like the Corpus of contemporary

English, the British National Corpus, the Oxford English Dictionary, or Merriam Webster online.

But the word actually has been around for more than a decade. The oldest reference I could find

for splitting being used this way, as opposed to being a word people occasionally used to just

describe spitting out liquid or something like that, was an urban dictionary entry from 2011

that talked about splitting corgis. The first use on Twitter was in mid-2012, also in reference to

...