Articles from March, 2012

If you saw last week’s Ten Words from Today’s Times, you know that amplify made an appearance, through a Goldman Sachs spokesperson quoted as saying: “It is unfortunate that an individual opinion about Goldman Sachs is amplified in a newspaper.” The following day, amplify showed up in The New York Times again, in this instance when a founder of an app called CityMaps said of the decision to include store-fronts’ Twitter feeds in the information it displays: “We want to amplify that messaging. You don’t sit down and follow 30 bars on Twitter.”

Is it possible that in our age of Internet-driven amplification we might want to check in on the multiple meanings and senses of this old but newly useful word? It's easy to do: just visit the amplify page in the Vocabulary.com Dictionary, spend some time noodling around amplify's blurb, word family diagram, and usage examples. And then click "Learn" to add it to your Challenge queue.

With March Madness under way and the AMC "Mad Men" premiere scheduled to air this Sunday night, the usage example tracker on our Dictionary page for the word mad is going, well, mad!