Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2014
In honor of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, which signals the close of the month-long Ramadan fast and takes places at sundown this evening, we bring you a new vocabulary list: Food and Drink Words with Arabic Roots.
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"A breath of fresh air." "Few and far between." "At the end of the day." These are just a few of the clichés examined by Orin Hargraves, an experienced lexicographer and one of our regular contributors, in his new book It's Been Said Before: A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Cliches. In this excerpt, Hargraves explains how to "free your speech and writing of unneeded and detrimental clichés."
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Mignon Fogarty, better known as her alter ego Grammar Girl, has been sharing a series of short tips on usage and style. In her latest installment, she explains why the plural of the word ox is oxen instead of oxes.
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
You're Never Too Young for Palindromes!
Word Play Lays the Foundation for Strong Language Skills
It's summer reading season, a great time for vocabulary growth. One summer reading option, Carol Weston's Ava and Pip, a novel for young readers, takes engagement with words to a new level, introducing the concept of words as toys to be taken apart and shaken around before being put back together.
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When you play Vocabulary.com, you'll see a wide variety of question types quizzing you on the meanings of words. But so far, the questions have been entirely text-based, relying on definitions, synonyms, antonyms, and example sentences. Today we are pleased to announce a brand-new type of question that takes advantage of the visual potential of vocabulary learning.
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When you visit your bank's website or enter a credit-card number, you've probably noticed that in the browser's address box, the URL begins with https. The "S" stands for "secure," and the security technology your browser uses for that "S" represents one of the great inventions in the history of secrets. In this piece I'll walk you through some of the terms of that rich field.
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One of the students in my Fiction Writing Workshop told a classmate to take a red pen and cross out the multitude of adverbs he had strewn throughout his story. The rest of the class nodded their heads in agreement. But just before I could move us on to the next item on the agenda, the author asked the young woman who'd spoken up, "But why? Why can't I use adverbs?"
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