Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2014
It's almost Euphemism of the Year time, and whoa nelly, do I have a contender: sluggish cognitive tempo. As Peter Aldhous notes in Slate, "The name of a 'new attention disorder' sounds like an Onion-style parody. It also sounds like a classic case of disease mongering: blurring normality with sickness to boost drug companies' bottom lines."
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Topics:
Fun
Under the HoodThe science of vocabulary building
A New Guinness Record: "Largest Vocabulary Lesson"
Preschoolers break the record in a language-focused read aloud
Four thousand children in 37 cities and 15 states set a new Guinness World Record for "largest vocabulary lesson" last week, through a vocabulary-focused read aloud organized by PNC's "Grow Up Great" program. But even as educators rally to the "close the word gap" through high profile efforts such as this one, new research shows that the task may not be quite so clear as increasing the sheer number of words children hear.
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Teachers around the country have been taking advantage of the Vocabulary.com Educator Edition to track student progress in their classes. And today the Educator Edition got even better, with a brand-new Teacher Dashboard that puts the most useful student data at your fingertips with a great new design.
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Vocabulary.com News
Vocabulary Shout-Out
Thanks, Taylor Swift, for the New York City Vocab
We agree! Regional dialect is tons of fun
As our culture becomes more homogenized, regional language distinctions fade away. But many are still out there, and they're still fun. Case in point: Taylor Swift's video on New York City-specific vocab, made for NYCGO's "Welcome 2 New York" campaign.
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Here's the latest in our series of quick tips on usage and style shared by Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. Mignon points out a common confusion that might leave you star-crossed.
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Ripped. Slapped. Poked. Swatted. If you've been watching the World Series, you've probably heard some of these verbs for hitting a baseball. Sports can involve a lot of repetition, so to make it different and exciting, sportscasters often use a wide variety of terms to describe the action. It is this variety that makes sports lingo an interesting object of study.
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Blog Excerpts
Ben Zimmer Wins LSA's Linguistics Journalism Award
The Linguistic Society of America today named Vocabulary.com-Visual Thesaurus Executive Producer Ben Zimmer as the first recipient of the Linguistics Journalism Award. The award honors "the journalist whose work best represents linguistics" during the past 12 months. In addition to his stellar work on Vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus, the LSA singled out Zimmer's language column in the Wall Street Journal, as well as "articles on linguistic topics for the Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Slate's 'Lexicon Valley' blog, and Language Log."
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