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. Continue reading...
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. Continue reading...
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. Continue reading...
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. Continue reading...
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. Continue reading...
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." Continue reading...
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. Continue reading...
With the school year starting up, it's the best time to map out how best to make vocabulary mastery an integral part of your curriculum. Continue reading...
One of the most persistent myths about word acquisition is that students don't need to be taught words; they just need to read more and their vocabularies will magically expand. This theory — which I like to call "learning words by osmosis" — doesn't hold much promise for your average or struggling reader. While it may hold true for a select group of students who are strong, avid readers possessing a curiosity about words, most students don't learn words by simply encountering them in reading. Continue reading...
For the Slate podcast Lexicon Valley, I delve into the many stories surrounding the origins of the word gringo, an epithet used by Latin Americans for foreign speakers, typically American Anglophones. Though a great deal of vivid folklore surrounds the word, its actual etymology is just as interesting. Continue reading...