Planet Word: A Museum All About Language
I didn’t know Planet Word existed until last week. I was staying with friends in Washington DC and their kids’ babysitter mentioned it in passing—a museum all about language, right in downtown D.C—and my jaw dropped. A museum about language? How had I not known about this? The following Monday I spent the entire day there (minus a lunch break with my cousin), and honestly, I could have stayed longer.
It’s located just off K Street, easy to get to, and free to enter (though they suggest a $15 donation, which I happily gave). Outside stands a shimmering metal tree with lighted tendrils, and a human-shaped sculpture made of letters from alphabets around the world, a perfect visual metaphor for the museum itself: something both universal and intimate, global yet personal.
The Third Floor: Language Origins & Connection
I started by taking the library-looking elevator to the top floor. Upon exiting was a wall showcasing an exhibit on how babies learn to talk. Multiple screens flashed words and videos, some mentioning a stage of early language acquisition, others depicting fun social media videos demonstrating the point. It’s the kind of thing you think you already know, but its delivery makes you realize how miraculous it is that anyone learns language at all.
You’re then led into a room anchored by a glowing globe surrounded by iPads. Each screen introduced you to speakers of different languages, maybe thirty to fifty in total. You’d meet someone like Mariame from Senegal, who speaks Wolof, and she’d teach you a word, explain something about her culture, then invite you to repeat it into the mic. It was beautifully humanizing; it wasn’t just about “learning words,” but also about connecting to the people who use them.
The next room featured a massive wall covered in sculpted words. Every fifteen minutes, a presentation would begin, tracing the evolution of English and how it absorbed elements from French, German, Latin, and beyond. As the story unfolded, light and shadow transformed the wall— words glowing, maps appearing, languages converging. At certain points, the narration asked the audience questions, and the room’s microphones picked up our answers, integrating them into the show. It was interactive in the best possible way: not gimmicky, just alive.
The Second Floor: Literacy & Play
The second floor felt like a library built for wonder. The lighting was warm, the shelves full, and the doorways painted with clever portmanteaux like “readgret” (sadness about putting off a book you should have read years ago) and “angstipation” (the feeling after finishing a book series on a cliffhanger).
Quotes lined the walls, too. One of my favorites from Matilda:
“Those books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: you are not alone.”
There were also short videos about computational linguistics (how computers detect plagiarism or authorship) and the experience of dyslexia.
I then found myself in a karaoke-style room called Unlock the Music, where you could belt out songs and learn about the linguistics of lyrics. I didn’t linger (karaoke isn’t my thing), but it looked like a lot of fun for the girls singing Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off.
From there I went into one of my favorite galleries, Joking Around: Words and Wit— a whole gallery dedicated to how humor is constructed in English. This included mini courses in joke writing, parody, satire, and why wordplay matters. Weird Al even made an appearance.
The Ground Floor: Power, Persuasion, and Prejudice
Downstairs, things got heavier, and more urgent. I’m Sold: Techniques of Persuasion explored how advertising, marketing, and propaganda use language to manipulate emotion and behavior. It was designed like a spiral— screens explaining marketing techniques walk you deeper and deeper into the art of persuasion, illuminating how anything from brand names to political messaging capture us.
But the room that hit hardest was Words Matter. This was, without question, the most sociolinguistic part of the museum. It unpacked how language shapes identity—and how linguistic bias can reflect and reinforce prejudice.
It was a reminder that words carry both history and belonging—that, depending on the context, they’re both passports and barriers.
Final Thoughts
Planet Word celebrates language as art, science, and culture all at once. And it’s doing real public service work—especially at a time when anti-intellectualism and linguistic prejudice have been emboldened in American life.
My only hope is that it continues to thrive. Spaces like this, that teach empathy, connection, and critical thinking through the joy of words, are exactly what we need more of. There’s so much more they could explore in the future: gendered speech, code-switching, digital communication, AI language, you name it.
But as it stands, Planet Word already proves something profound: language isn’t just how we communicate. It’s how we experience being human.
