In the American West, wildfires have become both more frequent and more destructive. With this ominous shift has come a new vocabulary for describing fire and its outcome – and new attention to some of the oldest words in our language. Continue reading...
Our vocabulary lists for each of the 2018 National Book Award finalists will help you and your students get the most out of these diverse titles. Continue reading...
You're familiar with canine and feline, but there's a marvelous menagerie of animal adjectives (Anserine! Piscine! Vulpine!) that we don't want to wind up on the endangered vocab list and disappear forever. So do your part: learn them and use them, either literally or metaphorically. Continue reading...
The first month of the 2018-19 Vocabulary Bowl went down as the biggest season-opener ever. Find out which schools cracked the Top 10 in their divisions and watch our shout-outs to some of the upstarts and underdogs across North America. Continue reading...
These days we need all the levity, lunar or otherwise, that we can get. This lexical lunacy is a flimsy excuse for me to write about my favorite type of word: the reduplication. From ack-ack to zip-zap, reduplicative words are silly, childish, catchy, animalistic, nonsensical, and awesome. Continue reading...
These chaos-describing words have, for the most part, a violent pedigree. Today's "ruckus" was likely a deadly event in the days of yore. We dive into a disorderly group of words that are appropriate for discussing both petty and primordial pandemonium. Continue reading...
We all make mistakes, big and little, and there's a large vocabulary of adjectives for when you messed up and you know it. Here's your chance to atone for your shameful vocabulary. Continue reading...
Until last month, holding the monthly words-mastered record was a feat that even the illustrious Etiwanda Eagles could not claim. Not any more. The real shocker? It was still preseason play. Continue reading...
When this 7th grade English teacher realized that her students could decode words but were not reading critically, she intervened immediately with Vocabulary.com and embarked on a research project to measure the outcomes. In her award-winning paper, Carolyn Streets describes the impact of systematic, direct vocabulary instruction as "transformational." Continue reading...