While discussing her memoir "Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl" on NPR's Fresh Air, Sleater-Kinney co-founder Carrie Brownstein used the word inchoate to describe her younger self. Later in the interview, she used trenchant when she explained the Sleater-Kinney sound. To call attention to Brownstein's sensitive care with her word choices, we pulled inchoate, trenchant and eight other words into a vocabulary list. Continue reading...
A deer is a common four-legged animal that has hooves and eats plants around the forest. Someone dear to you is a special or important loved one, such as a parent, child, or friend. The word dear is also used in interjections like "oh, dear!" or "dear me!" to indicate surprise, pity, or other emotions. Continue reading...
In a roundup of six apps that promise to "bulk up" your brain, TIME included Vocabulary.com for anyone looking to "become a wordsmith." Continue reading...
Teachers, administrators, and students, it's go time! Following the September "preseason," the second annual Vocabulary Bowl officially kicks off on October 1st, 2015 and will run through April 30, 2016. If you aren't signed up to play yet, this is a great time to get in on the action. Continue reading...
What happens when a misspelling gets enshrined in official documentation? Mike Pope, a technical writer and editor at Microsoft, looks at some embarrassing typographical errors that continue to linger in the world of computer programming. Continue reading...
The other day, my two teenage sons cajoled me into watching a movie they both find tremendously amusing. The film is not new. It's called Kangaroo Jack, and features Christopher Walken playing a small-time thug named Sal. Although Sal is the head of a bumbling crime family, he feels very insecure about his word knowledge, and throughout the film he is seen making a desperate attempt at self-improvement through the use of a tape-recorded vocabulary tutorial. In my favorite scene, a soothing female voice on Sal's tape player defines the word amorphous — having no shape or form, and then directs Sal to use the word in a sentence. Sal responds with this beauty: "After Joey Clams got whacked, his head was amorphous." Continue reading...
Yesterday, Vocabulary.com's director of curriculum development Georgia Scurletis joined Larry Jacobs, host of Education Talk Radio, to talk about how Vocabulary.com is making a difference for students around the country. Continue reading...
Lexicography is famously considered an art and science, but Kory Stamper thinks of it as a craft, a term implying "care, repetitive work, apprenticeship, and practice." Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries is a wonderful firsthand account of a lexicographical craftsperson who is master of another craft: writing. Few books about words—or anything else—are this well-written. Continue reading...
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. Continue reading...