Transport authorities announced Friday that they are taking action to stop people from registering their cars as hearses in order to reduce their fees. Authorities became aware that people were falsely registering their after several people called a radio station to talk about it. The first person to call into the the station, NewstalkZB, to talk about her scam was a woman from Christchurch who said she paid only 58 New Zealand dollars ($36) to register her car because she said it was a "noncommercial hearse. "

The 2006 update of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary adds mouse potatoes, googling and himbo, among 100 new words. The mouse potato is defined as someone who spends as much time on the computer as a coach potato does on the sofa.

The English language should be adopting its one-millionth word sometime this summer. The Global Language Monitor, a San Diego linguistic consultancy, gauged the rate of progress based on the fact that on March 21 there were about 988,968 words in the language, plus or minus a handful. GLM has its own formula that measures the language as found in print, electronic media and on television and radio, the Independent says.

It took 41 rounds and over 4 1/2 hours but Anna Rose Wright took home the top prize in the Treasure State Spelling Bee Saturday. Judge Lynn Schwanke says, "I have never seen a bee go this long, it was really remarkable. "

The word game Scrabble is now being used to prevent the extinction of a currently little-spoken language - that of the Dakota Sioux. Last Friday, teams from Sioux reservation schools in North Dakota, South Dakota and Manitoba faced-off in a Dakota Sioux Scrabble tournament, frantically consulting the Dakota Sioux Scrabble dictionary in order to get the correct spellings for words like "shah" - the color red - and "shah-pa" - dirty.