This fall season, 200,000 students collectively mastered over 5 million words in a race for word domination! See which schools made it out on top across every division, state, and province. Continue reading...
Yesterday we talked to sixth-grader Nicholas Rushlow, who finished 17th in the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee. At his home in Pickerington, Ohio, Nicholas maintains an impressive "word wall," festooned with many of the fascinating words he has learned while practicing for spelling bees. We asked Nicholas to share some of his favorites. And he has also created a Community Spelling Bee for us with even more "killer" words! Continue reading...
"Furlough." "Brinkmanship." "Shutdown." "Slimdown." The political stalemate on Capitol Hill about the federal budget and the Affordable Care Act has generated its own lexicon. Katy Steinmetz has compiled a helpful guide to shutdown buzzwords for TIME's Swampland blog — check it out here. Continue reading...
In the following description from her novel O My Darling (2005), Amity Gaige uses the words gloriole and mote to describe the effect of light and snow. Continue reading...
As students across the map returned to school, the word-learning revved up. See which schools — from vaunted veterans to unheard-of underdogs — brought the heat to the leaderboards. Continue reading...
George Dong, the founder of the not-for-profit Education in Sight, started learning English at age 15-years with the help of an e-dictionary. Now, he uses Vocabulary.com. Continue reading...
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. Continue reading...
Our To Kill a Mockingbird interactive word lists are among our most popular. But there's another kind of vocabulary you'll find in To Kill a Mockingbird: Southern-inflected words that testify to the more-defined regional nature of American English as it was spoken three quarters of a century ago. And with the news that Harper Lee will release a recently rediscovered novel written previous to To Kill a Mockingbird, we can only hope to find a rich store of Southern-inflected words there as well. Continue reading...
A few days after high school senior Katelyn "Lyn" Leech posted a list she'd created from the Broadway hit Hamilton using the Vocabulary.com list builder, her Twitter notifications went through the roof. She knew something was up, but it wasn't until she logged on that she saw what it was. Hamilton creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) had tweeted Lyn's list to his large following. Continue reading...