World Wide Words: BRITISH E-MAGAZINE GAINS SPECIAL US AWARD

BRITISH E-MAGAZINE GAINS SPECIAL US AWARD

World Wide Words, the British e-magazine about language with 50,000 subscribers worldwide, has today (Thursday 15 October) gained the specially created Timeless Award. It marks the unending appeal of its discussion of language and the ability of its e-mail list to bring together individuals who share a common interest in the English language.

The award comes from L-Soft International Inc of Landover, MD. L-Soft is the supplier of the well-known LISTSERV^® software that runs thousands of e-mail discussion and announcement lists, including the World Wide Words e-magazine. The award was created to mark L-Soft’s 15th anniversary.

Michael Quinion, World Wide Words’ list owner and author, responded, “This is a wonderful pleasure for the e-magazine, its many readers and for me. One of my aims over the past 660-plus weekly issues of World Wide Words has been to get across my own love of language to others who feel the same way and thereby to create a community of like-minded individuals.”

World Wide Words came top of the L-Soft LISTSERV Choice Awards public poll with 33,683 votes.

Michael added, “Special thanks go to the managers and staff of the Linguist List at Eastern Michigan University (particularly to Anthony Aristar and Susan Smith) who run the LISTSERV there and who have very kindly hosted World Wide Words on their system for more than a decade without asking for payment.”

BACKGROUND

World Wide Words began in 1996, almost in prehistoric times so far as the Web is concerned. Its linked Web site now contains more than 2,200 articles on aspects of English — new words, words in the news, antique words, answers to readers’ questions and book reviews. It has become a popular and respected resource for students, teachers and interested individuals wherever English is spoken. The site gets 420,000+ page hits a week, putting it among the most significant language resources online. About 88% of its visitors come from outside the UK (55% from the US), altogether from more than 200 countries and territories.

Contributing to the international flavour of the site is the fact that, though World Wide Words is determinedly British in flavour (its tagline is “International English from a British viewpoint”), its Web site is hosted in Germany and the e-magazine is distributed from the US.

Michael Quinion is a best-selling author. He wrote Port Out, Starboard Home (Penguin Books, 2003), which reached the British hardback charts. His most recent book is Why is Q Always Followed by U? (also from Penguin, July 2009), a compilation of 200 answers to questions posed by subscribers and visitors to the Web site. He also wrote Gallimaufry (OUP, 2005), about words that have gone from our daily lives because we don’t need them any more. His dictionary of affixes, Ologies and Isms (Oxford, 2002) has now become a much-consulted Web site.