Last week, a thirteen-year old wrote about shrinking vocabulary for her mother's blog on Palo Alto online, in which she wondered if the existence of new words is to blame for a decrease in the average person's vocabulary. Are words like selfie crowding more worthy vocabulary from our brains?
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Just in time for the 4th of July, our own Ben Zimmer investigates how the term "Yank" started off as a term of disparagement but was reclaimed as an expression of patriotic pride in settings from world wars to the World Cup.
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"Paladin" Versus "Taffeta": The Gender Word War is On
How Gender Predicts What Words You're Likely to Know
Business Insider announced this week the results of a study by the Center for Reading Research on the relationship between gender and word recognition. Are there words more easily recognized by one gender or another?
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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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The 2014 Spelling Bee Is Here!
It's time once again for the Scripps National Spelling Bee! The preliminaries are today, and the nationally televised semifinals and finals are tomorrow (May 29). As in past years, our own Ben Zimmer will be live-tweeting the competition from the @VocabularyCom Twitter account and reporting on the results here in his Word Routes column. In the meantime, catch up on our coverage of the format changes introduced last year that brought vocabulary questions into the mix: here and here.
On Twitter, the single word "blessed" has been pressed into service as a popular hashtag, often appended to self-serving portrayals of enviable lifestyles. The overuse of "#blessed" has led to a backlash against the hashtag, and now it frequently appears in tweets sarcastically. Has "#blessed" run its course? Our own Ben Zimmer joined in a discussion about the shelf-life of hashtags on Huffington Post Live.
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Words You Ought to Know But Don't: Call it Bubble Vocab?
Slate contributor gives this word-learning phenomenon a name
A great challenge for anyone looking to improve their vocabulary is identifying the words they don't know. Yesterday, Slate contributor Seth Stevenson gave the phenomenon a name in Bubble vocabulary: the words you almost know, sometimes use, but are secretly unsure of.
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