In The Washington Post's own coverage of the sale of the paper to Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, reporter Paul Farhi used epochal to describe the change digital technology is bringing to newspapers. Continue reading...
Jane Austen's masterwork Pride and Prejudice turns 200 today! Join the birthday celebration by quizzing yourself on words that may smack more of 1813 than they do of 2013 with our Vocabulary List "50 Words from Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice." Or check out the dozens of Pride and Prejudice Vocabulary Lists our users have made. Continue reading...
In a rapid-response survey of candidates' vocabulary in the first GOP debate, broadcast last night on Fox News, Vocabulary.com analyzed the transcript to identify each candidate's most relevant vocabulary word. And the data-driven approach yielded some interesting results about the candidates' language use. Continue reading...
Christmas songs: On city sidewalks and every street corner... from Black Friday through New Year's... they're broadcast inside and out, they stick in our heads, they are parodied and rewritten, and yet many of us, even as we sing along, don't give much thought to what the words mean. Continue reading...
It's time once again for "Word of the Year" season! The New Oxford American Dictionary gets things started by naming its Word of 2010: Sarah Palin's notorious Twitterism, refudiate. Read about the selection and the runners-up (including vuvuzela and nom nom) on the Oxford University Press blog here. And read more about refudiate in Ben Zimmer's Word Routes column here. Continue reading...
"Supercalifragilistic-expialidocious," the sesquipedalian word made famous by Mary Poppins, has a peculiar and contentious history. Ben Zimmer told the story of his hunt for the word's origins, ending up in Syracuse, in his Word Routes column. Syracuse Post-Standard columnist Sean Kirst talked to Zimmer about the search in his latest column. Read it here. Continue reading...
Vocabulary.com announces new custom leaderboards. Now you can create your own mini-version of the Vocabulary Bowl with up to 50 schools of your choosing. Continue reading...