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Marina Vladimirovna Orlova Марина Владимировна Орлова
Born	Marina Orlova (1980-12-10) 10 December 1980 (age 44) Arzamas, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality	Russian/American
Years active	2007–present
Known for	Infotainment etymology
Template:Infobox person/Internet info
Website	www.hotforwords.com

Marina Vladimirovna Orlova (Template:Lang-ru) (born December 10, 1980) is a Russian philologist who has become an Internet celebrity, hosting a popular channel on YouTube, HotForWords, and a corresponding website. in the early 2000s, she was a bi-weekly guest on Maxim Radio on Sirius Satellite Radio. In 2012 she started an online series of videos for a personal finance website Bankrate.com where she explains the meaning of commonly used financial and economic terms.

Early life and education

Orlova was born in Arzamas (Nizhny Novgorod Oblast) Russian SFSR, Soviet Union in 1980. In an interview, she claimed to work at a shop for a year before applying to an international recruitment program; she was then sent to a small town near San Francisco and worked as a nanny for a working family with two children.

Orlova initially aspired to become a model. She went to two photoshoots, but did not succeed – she was told that at 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 m), she was too short to be a model.

She has two degrees in philology and taught English and world literature to high school students in Moscow before moving to the United States to pursue further education.

Orlova rents an apartment in Beverly Hills. She has said that her work takes up all of her time, and that she sometimes sits at the computer 12 to 14 hours at a time and has little time left for socializing.

Hot for Words website

The theme of Orlova's website and YouTube videos, which begin with the tagline "Intelligence is Sexy," is tracing the origins of English words. Some of her entries focus on everyday words such as "irony" and "OK," while others address lengthy and rarely used words such as "floccinaucinihilipilification " and "antidisestablishmentarianism." Some entries also address idioms, including "let the cat out of the bag," "dressed to the nines," and "three sheets to the wind," or new words like the verb "to google."

The channel became active in February 2007, at a time when, Orlova said, "everybody was uploading cleavage." Orlova has since been voted "World's #1 Sexiest Geek" in Wired Magazine's "Sexy Geek of the Year Contest". G4 TV has listed Orlova among its "Hot Women of the Net" on several occasions, and Cosmopolitan Magazine has identified her as the "most subscribed to YouTube guru." Orlova appeared on the cover of the November 2009 issue of the wine, beer and spirits publication Mutineer Magazine, applying her trademark word explanations to common beverage words. Orlova has appeared on a number of Fox shows including on The O'Reilly Factor, and was profiled on "The Medium," an Internet feature of The New York Times Magazine. In June 2008, Orlova and radio personality Danny Bonaduce signed endorsement contracts with coComment.

The Moscow Times said "Marina exploits her blonde-bombshell looks to the maximum: She appears in her two-minute clips scantily clad, pouting and making doe eyes. This is surely the main factor in her success. However, while the number of scantily clad girls on the Internet is limitless, not all of them put so much intellectual effort into their success."

In an interview, Orlova explained how she got viewers interested in words: "How else could I attract them to words?" "Everyone knows that sex sells."

In spring of 2010 Marina started doing video lessons of Russian for RT (TV network) and in the fall of the same year, she was hired to be the spokeswoman for AnastasiaDate, an online dating website.

Bibliography

• Orlova, Marina (2009). Hot for Words: Answers to All Your Burning Questions About Words and Their Meanings. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0061776311. LCCN 2008053684. OCLC 291193606.

References

1. ^ "Marina Orlova: About the Author". harpercollins.com. Retrieved 2010-04-05.
2. "Interview with Marina Orlova, HotForWords: In the business of explaining words", In2up, 24 May 2011. Retrieved on 23 August 2012.
3. ^ Наталья ДЕРБЕНЕВА (March 19, 2010). "Английский язык в Голливуде преподает русская блондинка" (in Russian). Комсомольская правда. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
4. HotForWords G4 TV Appearance of Marina Orlova.
5. ^ Kazakina, Katya (September 25, 2009). "Google Trails Linguist With Lingerie, 238 Million YouTube Views". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2010-08-06.
6. Molly Fahner, Cosmopolitan Magazine, June 2008.
7. "Current and Back Issues". Mutineer Magazine. Retrieved 2010-08-06.
8. "Internet vixen teaches O'Reilly a thing or two about origins of words". Fox News. Retrieved 2010-01-08.
9. Virginia Heffernan, Sexicon, The New York Times Magazine, December 17, 2007.
10. "coComment Ignites Web Commenting With HotForWords and Danny Bonaduce". redorbit.com. June 11, 2008. Retrieved 2010-08-15.
11. Marina Orlova has managed to get several million people interested in the origins of English words(registration required), Victor Sonkin, The Moscow Times, June 6, 2008.
12. "RT presents Russian with Hot For Words". RT.com. Retrieved 2011-11-11.
13. http://www.adrants.com/2010/11/former-go-daddy-girl-investigates.php

External links

• Official "HotForWords" website
• HotForWords's channel on YouTube
• Marina Orlova's Russian class on RT

Template:Persondata

• 1980 births
• Living people
• People from Arzamas
• Russian emigrants to the United States
• Russian Internet personalities
• American people of Russian descent
• Russian expatriates
• Philologists