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Here's the latest in our series of quick tips on usage and style shared by Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. Mignon points out a common confusion that might leave you star-crossed. Continue reading...

Ripped. Slapped. Poked. Swatted. If you've been watching the World Series, you've probably heard some of these verbs for hitting a baseball. Sports can involve a lot of repetition, so to make it different and exciting, sportscasters often use a wide variety of terms to describe the action. It is this variety that makes sports lingo an interesting object of study. Continue reading...

The Linguistic Society of America today named Vocabulary.com-Visual Thesaurus Executive Producer Ben Zimmer as the first recipient of the Linguistics Journalism Award. The award honors "the journalist whose work best represents linguistics" during the past 12 months. In addition to his stellar work on Vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus, the LSA singled out Zimmer's language column in the Wall Street Journal, as well as "articles on linguistic topics for the Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Slate's 'Lexicon Valley' blog, and Language Log." Continue reading...

Across the country, middle school students are entering the early stages of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, competing on the classroom, grade, and school levels. Here are three strategies for approaching the vocabulary questions that are now part of the Bee, and a free Vocabulary.com resource to use when executing each one. Continue reading...

Following today's release of the teen horror pic Ouija, we're taking another look at our blurb for the word. Turns out, it's less about the occult and more about "getting to 'yes.'" Continue reading...

Anyone who works for a large organization (or maybe even a small one) knows that certain phrases grab people's imagination and spread through the organization. If you're like me, you go to meetings and presentations and expressions keep popping up, which is very distracting — you try to listen to what the speaker is saying, but you end up paying more attention to how they're saying it. Continue reading...

Can a large vocabulary make you...sexy? If you're Tom Hiddleston, the actor who plays Loki in the film Thor, the answer is yes. According to a recent Bustle compilation of Hiddleston's greatest feats of vocabulary derring-do, we've compiled a list of words "guaranteed to make you swoon." Continue reading...

For my latest appearance on Slate's Lexicon Valley podcast, I quizzed the hosts Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield about a five-letter word that seemed to spring out of nowhere in online usage about a decade ago but in fact has roots that are centuries old: snark. Continue reading...

Following up on the American Association of School Librarians' selection of Vocabulary.com as a "Best Website for Teaching and Learning 2014," the association released a review of Vocabulary.com, in which it recommends our site for differentiated learning and suggests several concrete ways teachers can make use of our tool. 

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