Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from April, 2014
Once upon a time, fellas, gentleman, and guys roamed the land. Eventually, we become dudes. Unfortunately, many of us became bros. Bro is also a staple of word-making. Based on sheer prolificness, bro may be the affix of the decade.
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Blog Excerpts
Words You Ought to Know But Don't: Call it Bubble Vocab?
Slate contributor gives this word-learning phenomenon a name
A great challenge for anyone looking to improve their vocabulary is identifying the words they don't know. Yesterday, Slate contributor Seth Stevenson gave the phenomenon a name in Bubble vocabulary: the words you almost know, sometimes use, but are secretly unsure of.
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Last month we launched the Vocabulary.com app for iPhones and iPads, bringing the addictive Vocabulary.com game and the powerful dictionary that supports it to the palm of your hand. The release was an instant hit, rocketing to the top of the App Store charts for education apps. Today we are pleased to announce that the Vocabulary.com app is now available for Android devices as well.
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Vocabulary.com News
Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
Word Tasting Note: "Victuals"
Could this word by any other name taste so sweet?
Victuals is one of those words that many people know by sound and sight but have not put sound and sight together. It's sort of like knowing someone by name and knowing someone by face, but not realizing the two are the same person. Until you accidentally find out, and it's usually embarrassing.
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Dept. of Word Lists
Bring on Soviet-Era Nostalgia, Cold War Style
How else did Kermit get put in the gulag?
Putin invades Crimea. Kermit goes to the gulag. The Cold War is hot right now, and so are these words.
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As I was searching Twitter while writing last month's column on bae, I occasionally found tweets saying things like, "Gonna turn up tonight with my bae!" Now why would someone find it newsworthy to announce that they were simply going to appear somewhere? Of course, not everything people tweet is newsworthy, but still, why such excitement over simply showing up?
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Vocabulary Shout-Out
In Defense of "Obsequious"
Friend to "bootlickers," "fawners," "sycophants," and "toadies" everywhere
In an editorial for the Chicago Tribune yesterday, columnist Eric Zorn took issue with the College Board's inclusion of obsequious in a list of "low-frequency words that would be unlikely to be assessed directly as words-in-context questions on the redesigned SAT."
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