What's one of the fastest ways to dramatically alter your life, save your marriage, improve your golf game, bring about world peace, or finally start remembering to change the oil in your car? Deleting one all important word from your vocabulary. Continue reading...
It's never easy picking a Euphemism of the Year. For 2014, it feels like a four-horse race—or should I say a four-pronged equine competition. My picks for EOTY are a Gwyneth Paltrow special and three other mounds of mumbo-jumbo. Read them and weep for clear, honest, non-sneaky language. Continue reading...
It's that time of year -- when you vow to do better in all things and yet, even as you solemnly swear, you know most of us will abandon our resolutions early on in the coming year. The good news? You're here on Vocabulary.com, which is designed to transform your current resolution into a word learning habit that affects the way you speak, read, write, and think. Here's how we make your resolution stick. Continue reading...
After spending more than 180 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, Lauren Hillenbrand's Unbroken reached film going audiences this week through a new movie directed by Angelina Jolie. After marveling at the story of resilience and heroism, learn the vocabulary Hillenbrand employed to tell the tale via five Vocabulary Lists: Continue reading...
Like stargazers pointing out particularly twinkly items seen in the night sky, we generally use this column to alert the world to shiny words we come across in our reading here. Today, we're pointing out a piece of writing without a single piece of vocabulary bling in it, a vocabulary-oriented achievement in its own right. Continue reading...
The holiday season is famous for its hustle and bustle. But that doesn't mean word learning has to come to a stop. In fact, the holidays provide many opportunities to acquire and think about words. It's just a question of knowing where to look for them. Continue reading...
It's time once again for the annual look back at the noteworthy words of the past year. Did you indulge in any manspreading or Columbusing this year? Were you concerned about dark money or plastigomerate? Here's a veritable vortex of words that rose to prominence in 2014. Continue reading...
Writing about the relationship between Russia and the Ukraine this past year, Steve Forbes has taken to using the somewhat rare word satrap. We're thrilled that Forbes is trotting out the not-often-seen word, but want to offer a correction. Continue reading...
In an interview with Stephen Colbert, whose "Colbert Report" ends this week after nine years on the air, Ben Zimmer gets the inside scoop on truthiness, Colbert's ultimate "silly word that would feel wrong in your mouth." 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...