Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2014
We're happy to introduce the first in a series of tips on usage and style from the inimitable Grammar Girl, a.k.a. Mignon Fogarty. First up: how do you punctuate do and don't when the words are pluralized?
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Logophiles in Love: Words to Woo By
Play the word-stumper game with your honey
When logophiles Henry and Catherine Petroski were first falling in love, they passed each other "word stumper" notes in lieu of flowers and candy. Want to replicate their game? Here are ten word stumpers to enjoy or share.
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Is Screen Time Good Vocabulary Building for Children?
A study of British children's creative writing suggests it is
Anyone familiar with the children's movie Despicable Me 2 will not be surprised to hear that use of minion among children has grown by 250 percent in the last year. Similarly, kids who play Minecraft are not immune to the charms of unusual vocabulary ocelot, nether and spawn as never before. Does this mean screen time might actually be good for vocab?
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Days of Future Past: It's not just the subtitle of the new X-Men movie that recently opened; it's an invitation to explore some of the lesser-traveled corridors in the English verb tense system.
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
How a Teacher Inspired Her School to Dominate the Vocabulary.com Leaderboard
When we tabulated the schools with the highest point totals on the Vocabulary.com leaderboard for the past school year, the overall winner was no surprise. Corkscrew Middle School in Naples, Florida, which won the monthly championship banner three times (in November, January, and April), accumulated a total of more than 220 million points over the last nine months.
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Context collapse is cited by researchers as a reason friendships fall apart online, with only the Borg mind of Mark Zuckerberg to connect them. That certainly makes sense. If the only context we share is that we were in the same fourth-grade English class, and the teacher tossed the same erasers at us for talking in class, and we didn't even like each other much then, our context is thinner than a supermodel.
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Blog Excerpts
Slate Calls Vocabulary.com "The First Significant Improvement" to Flashcards in 200 Years
SAT tutor James Murphy on the history of flashcards
Writing for Slate, James S. Murphy explores the history of the flashcard, calling the Vocabulary.com app "the first significant improvement on the flashcard model of learning in 200 years."
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