Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2015
Teachers at WorkA column about teaching
Collaborative List Creation: Now That's an Idea!
An eighth grade teacher shakes up her Monday morning vocab routine with Vocabulary.com
Eighth grade teacher Erin Vanek decided to shake up her Monday morning vocabulary routine with Vocabulary.com, and her experiment with collaborative list creation paid off. Read on to discover how you can use collaborative list creation to ground your students' introduction to words as they are used, and not as they are defined.
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In his latest batch of under-the-radar euphemisms, Mark Peters introduces such linguistic doozies as "ethical cheating," an oxymoronic term that came to light after the Ashley Madison hacking hubbub.
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Under the HoodThe science of vocabulary building
What's the Most Relevant Word in "Moby Dick"?
Backed by a 3.2 billion word corpus, our list builder gets it right every time.
In our coverage of the first Republican presidential candidates' debate last month, we used our vocabulary list builder to find the most relevant word each candidate used. Now, before Republicans take to the stage again, we want to explain what we mean by "relevance." Understanding it sheds light on not just how we're analyzing candidates' speech, but also how we're pulling vocabulary from academic and literary texts.
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Blog Excerpts
Celebrating Labor (and Labour) Day
On the first Monday in September, the United States observes Labor Day, while Canadians celebrate Labour Day. If you want to know why labour is the accepted spelling in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries like Canada, while Americans prefer labor (and color, favor, honor, humor, and neighbor), check out this classic Word Routes column by Ben Zimmer.
Topics:
Words
Tips & Tricks
To Create a Culture of Word Learning, Get School Rivalries Going
Competition within a district fires up game play for all.
Last school year, we noted an interesting trend among the most successful schools playing in our annual Vocabulary Bowl: they were operating in an environment of district-wide play.
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Many verbs that entail some advanced cognitive capacity are commonly used in predicates for subjects that are not human. All speakers are comfortable with sentences like "Verizon revamps mobile plans and ends 2-year contracts & subsidies." Most speakers, however, reject sentences like "Microsoft is vividly imagining a purple square."
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Blog Excerpts
Originality is Overrated
Interrupting the tired look-up-and-write-a-sentence instruction loop.
We have all seen this tired loop of "instruction": distribute word list, have students look up words, ask students to use the words in original sentences. While encouraging usage is never a bad idea, it's not realistic to expect students to pivot from definition to usage without guidance. We suggest ditching (or at least delaying) the idea of originality and instead asking students to model their sentences on usage examples written by those people who are especially skilled with using words: professional writers.
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