The Visual Thesaurus is a proud sponsor of public radio's A Way with Words, a "freewheeling joy ride through the English language," that airs every weekend in San Diego, the Midwest and around the world via podcasts. When the ninth season of the show kicks off this Saturday, host Martha Barnette will be joined by a new partner, lexicographer Grant Barrett (read our interview with Grant here). We caught up with Martha to talk about her show, her work and her latest book, the delightful Ladyfingers and Nun's Tummies.

Professor David Crystal is one of the world's foremost experts on the English language. The author of over 100 books, he also runs an acclaimed website with his son called Shakespeare's Words and has just launched a new blog. We got curious when we came across David's new book, called The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left, his answer to the best-selling "Eats, Shoots & Leaves." Fight for English? We called David at his home in Great Britain to discuss his book, and the state of the English language.

Geoffrey Pullum, the co-creator of the language website Language Log, sums up his site's popularity this way: "A: We like to have fun. B: We enjoy writing. And C: We're linguists." Over 40,000 people a week visit for a smart, witty, wry -- and, yes, fun -- take on how we use this English language of ours. Now Geoffrey and his collaborator Mark Liberman, both linguistics professors, have captured the flavor of their website in a new book called Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log. We called Geoffrey to talk about his work.

World Wide Words is just that: Everything and anything about the English language, compiled by lexicographer Michael Quinion. From a well-stocked library in the little British market town of Thornbury, Michael writes a weekly newsletter read by some 50,000 people around the world. It's a veritable salmagundi of etymology, history, weird words, obsolete words, grammar and answers to readers' questions. Hey, where else can you learn about "the hairy antecedents of 'rebarbative?'" Michael's also a freelance contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary and an accomplished author. His latest book, just released, is called Gallimaufry, about words that have vanished from the English language. We had a rather delightful conversation with Michael:

There are, in round figures, some 100,000 words and phrases in the slang vocabulary. That's half a millennium's coinage, of course, and it's not just British English.

Erin McKean is the editor of the The New Oxford American Dictionary, the New World cousin of the authoritative, if bulky, Oxford English Dictionary (20 volumes!). She fell in love with words early -- Erin's wanted to be a lexicographer since she was eight years old. She got her wish, working on the Thorndike-Barnhart children's dictionaries for eight years after getting a BA/MA in Linguistics. She's been at Oxford since 2000. We spoke to Erin about writing dictionaries:

You know what "booze" means, of course, but what if you asked someone in London for a definition -- say, 500 years ago? Lexicographer Jonathon Green will tell you the word is a lot older than you might think. He's spent the last quarter century studying slang, and its history, in the English language. The respected editor of the authoritative Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon's written over a dozen books on the subject and has collected a database of over 100,000 slang words. He's now working on a mammoth multi-volume dictionary, due out in 2008, that will cover a half a millennium's worth of words, phrases and figures of speech -- salty and otherwise -- that have seeped into English as slang. We talked to Jonathon about his passion: