Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2015
Dept. of Word Lists
For Vocab Learners: Shakespeare, Melville...and Eminem?!
Of top selling artists, Hip Hop's the most vocab intensive.
Sparking comments about Kanye West giving Bob Dylan the "thesaurus blues," a new survey of the vocabulary of top-selling musical artists puts Eminem at the top of a chart dominated by hip hop in general.
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Announcements
The New York Times + Vocabulary.com = Enlightened Students
The New York Times Learning Network partners with Vocabulary.com
Here at Vocabulary.com, we have always believed that one of the best ways to improve your vocabulary while learning about world events is by regularly reading a newspaper like The New York Times. That's why we are especially proud to announce our partnership with The New York Times Learning Network . This partnership will further boost students' literacy skills by bringing Vocabulary.com's word-learning power to students accessing The Times' fresh and engaging content on a daily basis.
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Vocabulary.com News
Laughter is always good medicine, and today the Internet has put at our disposal the ability to draw it out through the combination in unexpected ways of two things that pervade modern culture: pictorial representation and vernacular language.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
How Did We Get the "Heebie-Jeebies"?
The tale of a comic-strip race horse, Louis Armstrong, and a jittery dance.
For Slate's podcast Lexicon Valley, I look at the origins of an expression that turns nervousness and apprehension into a jokey malady: the heebie-jeebies. It turns out we can pin down not just the coiner but the very day that he coined the word.
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Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About Language
Trump-mentum? Bernie-mentum? The Return of a Popular Electoral Suffix
Whether you like or loathe it, I bet you've noticed the return of –mentum: a suffix that fills the Internet during election season much as a sulfurous smell fills hell. This suffix is also a terrific reminder of a sad truth: the media will never, ever treat a presidential election as anything more than a sporting event with fewer concussions.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
Is "Southpaw" from Boxing or Baseball?
The term for left-handers is steeped in 19th-century athletic lore.
With the boxing movie "Southpaw" opening, it's a good time to ponder where the term "southpaw" came from as an epithet for a left-hander. Baseball and boxing have both used the term for a long time to label lefty athletes, but which came first?
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CandlepowerAd and marketing creatives
The Lingo of Pluto: New Horizons, New Words
The New Horizons space probe teaches us how to speak Plutonian.
Pluto is coming into startingly sharp focus, thanks to the first images and data received from the space probe New Horizons last week. As we learn more about this distant cousin of Earth, we're also expanding our linguistic horizons. Here's a closer look at some of the words and names in the Plutonian news.
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