WordFixx

For me, the word BIOME hardly ever came up until Minecraft started adding more and more biomes with its updates; there are even mods like Biomes O' Plenty that specialize in creative world generation.  A BIOME is essentially an ecosystem or local environment, not to be confused with the BIOTA which is the sum of all FLORA (plants) and FAUNA (animals) that live in the area.  You can also include the MICROFAUNA, which are all the microscopic denizens of a biome.  These are fairly recent words, with BIOME dated back to 1916 and BIOTA back to 1901. A less common word for biome is BIOTOPE, which dates to 1927, peaked in the 1970s and is now very obscure.  And then a group of related biotopes is a BIOCHORE. Oddly, the Google Ngram for " biome,biota,biotope " shows that BIOTA hit a peak in 1978.   If you add biochore to the chart, it doesn't even register, but it's in the [MW] dictionary. I wondered briefly what word took over that namespace, and figured it would be ...

There is a strange and cartoony clump of words centered around SQUISH, or the idea or sound of squishing things.  This includes SQUUSH, SQUSH, and SQUOOSH, and an Ngram view of these shows all kinds of ups and downs in the noise of word history ... The first of these to appear was SQUSH, around 1830, and it was used in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter 29.  SQUUSH came about in 1850, peaked well below the others in 1970 and is headed down to obscurity these days, while SQUOOSH first gets a blip around 1880 and had a big upturn from 1950 to 2010, but it now sinking as, much to my surprise, SQUSH is taking off. Since these are all verbs, they have the full range of strange-looking endings which would be fun for a Scrabble night: SQUUSHED, SQUUSHES, SQUUSHING, SQUSHED, SQUSHES, SQUSHING, SQUOOSHED, SQUOOSHES, SQUOOSHING and can be turned into adjectives as SQUSHY, SQUUSHY and SQUOOSHY. OMG, it's never ending, there are comparative versions SQUSHIER, SQUUSHIER, SQUOOSHI...