Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2014
Tips & Tricks
Prepping for Your School Spelling Bee? Don't Forget Vocab
Use Vocabulary.com to explore the words as you learn to spell
Across the country, middle school students are entering the early stages of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, competing on the classroom, grade, and school levels. Here are three strategies for approaching the vocabulary questions that are now part of the Bee, and a free Vocabulary.com resource to use when executing each one.
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Vocabulary Shout-Out
Ever Wonder Where the Word "Ouija" Came From?
Only the spirits seems to truly know...
Following today's release of the teen horror pic Ouija, we're taking another look at our blurb for the word. Turns out, it's less about the occult and more about "getting to 'yes.'"
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Anyone who works for a large organization (or maybe even a small one) knows that certain phrases grab people's imagination and spread through the organization. If you're like me, you go to meetings and presentations and expressions keep popping up, which is very distracting — you try to listen to what the speaker is saying, but you end up paying more attention to how they're saying it.
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Dept. of Word Lists
What's Not Sexy About Having a Big Vocabulary?
Tom Hiddleston's use of big words make fans "swoon"
Can a large vocabulary make you...sexy? If you're Tom Hiddleston, the actor who plays Loki in the film Thor, the answer is yes. According to a recent Bustle compilation of Hiddleston's greatest feats of vocabulary derring-do, we've compiled a list of words "guaranteed to make you swoon."
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For my latest appearance on Slate's Lexicon Valley podcast, I quizzed the hosts Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield about a five-letter word that seemed to spring out of nowhere in online usage about a decade ago but in fact has roots that are centuries old: snark.
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Blog Excerpts
School Librarians Recommend Vocabulary.com for Differentiated Word Learning
American Association of School Librarians review comes after site is named "Best Website for Teaching and Learning 2014"
Following up on the American Association of School Librarians' selection of Vocabulary.com as a "Best Website for Teaching and Learning 2014," the association released a review of Vocabulary.com, in which it recommends our site for differentiated learning and suggests several concrete ways teachers can make use of our tool.
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When the ABC-TV sitcom "Black-ish" debuted in September, it joined a growing set of titles and brands built on the odd little ish suffix. There's a lot more to ish than "sort of" and "more or less." Here's a brand-by-brand rundown of the ish spectrum.
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