Did you know Vocabulary.com is a great test prep resource? With SAT season upon us, here's a review of how to use Vocabulary.com to prepare for any standardized test. Continue reading...
What happens when wild chimpanzees go to a party? They wreck the furniture, wreak havoc, and make the whole house reek. To wreck is to ruin something, to wreak is to cause something to happen, and to reek is to smell bad. Continue reading...
Vain people love mirrors. A vein, though, moves blood through your body. And a vane is a big metal rooster on a rooftop showing which way the wind blows. Continue reading...
As you speed through the Challenge watching the words you’ve learned accumulate like so many dollars in the savings account of life, do you ever stop and wonder how many words are actually out there? Continue reading...
We were thrilled to read an interview in which Drew Barrymore talks about how she "fell in love with the dictionary." Turns out, she's as into words as we are, and her favorite is the little-known "empyrean." Continue reading...
Writing about an opt-out of testing movement brewing in her children's elementary school (and elsewhere), New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead used the highly-specific invigilate which, despite the fact that it describes a practice taking place in schools around the world every minute of every day, is a word most people don't know. Continue reading...
Writing for The New York Times last week about the tricky process of translating dialect from one language to another, literary translator Anthony Shugaar used the not-often-seen interlard. Continue reading...
Unpacking arboreal, canine, and monitory reveal wit and fun(!)in a David Gates review of Lorrie Moore's latest collection of short stories, "Bark." Continue reading...
Writing for Vulture, "the first in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future," The Roots' Questlove uses the word trivial in such a knowledgeable and cool way we had to offer up a shout-out. Continue reading...
Recently, science writer Annie Murphy wrote about "E-memory—electronic memory, the kind that's available on a computer" and "O-memory—organic memory, the old-fashioned sort that resides in the brain." Here's how that distinction can help us think about the way we learn words. Continue reading...