What’s in a word?

There has been a bit of online buzz lately around what we should call ourselves in the new era now dawning. Should it be Marketing Research or Market Research? It made me wonder in a fanciful sort of way whether we should be thinking about the second word as well. Does Research still fit?

So I grabbed the definition of research from five online dictionaries (Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, Cambridge and Google) plus Wikipedia, did a little bit of editing to standardize some word forms and created this word cloud using Wordle.

I repeated the exercise with another word we hear tossed around to describe our future: consultant.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions.