links for 2007-12-18

• Fun With Words: Collective Nouns
  One of the craziest oddities of the English language is that there are so many different collective nouns that all mean "group" but which are specific to what particular thing there is a group of: a herd of elephants, a crowd of people, a box of crayons,
  (tags: fun language reference dictionary writing)
• AskOxford: Is it true that English has the most words of any language?
  This question is practically impossible to answer, for the reasons set out in the answer to How many words are there in the English language? However, it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages.
  (tags: language writing essay england usa)