Ben Zimmer is executive editor of Vocabulary.com and VisualThesaurus.com and language columnist for The Wall Street Journal. A self-described linguist, lexicographer and all-around word nut, Zimmer has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. He is the former language columnist for The Boston Globe and The New York Times Magazine, and his writing about language has also appeared in The Atlantic and Slate, among other outlets. Zimmer is the Chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society and organizes the selection of the Word of the Year at the society’s annual conference. He was recently named the recipient of the first ever Linguistics Journalism Award.