LTHO the production of beet sugar may still be considered an infant industry in the United States, young in years and somewhat dependent upon protection, its complexity and its increasing magnitude arrest attention. Much investigation has been devoted to the agricultural, engineering, and economic problems involved; but linguistic students have neglected the special vocabularies which have grown up among the many people working with sugar beets.' Sugar beet language has no very unusual characteristics, but it at least illustrates anew many of the ways in which vocabularies develop. In raising sugar beets-the farm end of the industry-, processes and words familiar in other agricultural activities are utilized. Since plant breeding and plant cultivation are at the basis of the industry, botanical terms are common: the sugar beet is a biennial, bred for sugar content, with a tap root, secondary roots, and root hairs which obtain food from the soil by osmosis; the seed stalks grow out of the crown of the year old mother beet, or stecklinge, during the second summer. Needless to say, it is the agricultural expert rather than the farmer himself who talks of parenchyma cells and the action of enzymes. Once the farmer has secured the best seed, usually imported from Europe, he prepares the seed bed; plants; cultivates; and-in the Western states-irrigates. These processes involve hard labor; horseback methods of farming do not bring large beet yields. The preparation of a fit seed bed may involve work with plow, fine tooth harrow, float, spring-tooth harrow, a roller or leveler, and sometimes a disk harrow and a subsoil plow. The seed if hard may be scarified with a special machine to hasten its germination, but this is unusual; the seed may also have been decorticated or otherwise treated. Attempts have been made to produce seed balls which contain but one germ each, in order to make thinning of young plants easier; but the single germ beet is not yet practical. The planting is done with a drill or seeder. If a good stand of beets does not result, it is often desirable to reseed. In preparation for irrigation, the field is ditched by a small horsedrawn plow, called a ditcher. If the ground is wet, a webfoot shoe is attached to the plow. Irrigation farmers call beets, potatoes, and