It's a little early to know what the 2015 Word of the Year will be, but I'd say we have a contender: dadbod (or dad bod). After appearing in an essay by Mackenzie Pearson, this term went viral, then nuclear, then possibly intergalactic. Dadbod has become so commonly used that I wouldn't be surprised if, somewhere near the Mars Rover, the term is validating the flabby physiques of retired Martian warlords. Continue reading...
Vocabulary.com celebrated the first-place finish of Houston's Chavez High School in the 2014-2015 Vocabulary Bowl with a special ceremony on Friday, May 15. Students, teachers, and staff were presented with the Vocabulary Bowl trophy, medals for the top 100 students, and a special proclamation from the Texas State Senate commemorating the students' impressive achievement. Continue reading...
Teachers, we've got great news. Now, when you sign up as an educator on Vocabulary.com, you can create classes for every period you teach, monitor the performance of each class, gain insight into where you need to focus your instruction, and use class leaderboards to light a competitive fire among your students. Continue reading...
Here are the names of three products currently sold in stores and online: Pout Polish, Pout-à-Porter, Pout-o-matic. Here are three business names from around the United States: Kool Smiles, Smileworks, Smile Wide. And here's a question: What do those names tell you about what's being sold and to whom? Continue reading...
Lose sounds like snooze. If you lose something, you don’t have it anymore. Add an “o” and loose rhymes with goose and describes something that’s not attached. Continue reading...
Warning! These similar sounding words have very different meanings. To prescribe is to recommend and to proscribe is to forbid. One little letter makes a big difference. Continue reading...
Here at Vocabulary.com, we are constantly on the lookout for funky and impressively obscure words deserving of a comeback. Case in point: emulous, a fantastic word that gives us the ability to describe a feeling that dogs many of us all through life and yet is very hard to pinpoint. Continue reading...
The weather is getting warmer, so you might start to see men arrayed in stylishly rumpled seersucker suits (especially in the American South). On the latest installment of Slate's podcast Lexicon Valley, I followed the thread of seersucker all the way back to its Persian roots, and then looked at how both the fabric and the word spread around the world. Continue reading...
Following the enormously successful release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Slate's words correspondent Katy Waldman raised a question, "Why are they called the Avengers? What are they avenging?" This put us in mind of lexicographer Neal Whitman's observation a few years back that, at least in movies, "Avenging and vengeance are for good guys, while revenge is for the bad guys." Continue reading...
Lying is one of those embarrassing things that demands euphemisms. No one wants to say "I lied" or "I fibbed" or "I wrote fan fiction." So when called on the carpet for a lie, people reach into the lexical abyss for euphemisms. Continue reading...