When the fourth through eighth graders at Enrico Fermi School for the Performing Arts in Yonkers, NY swept the Vocabulary.com school leaderboard in May, their entire community stood up and took notice. Continue reading...
In our summer reading series, Vocabulary.com gets up close and personal with the authors of some of our favorite books about summer. In this installment we talk with award-winning author Kekla Magoon, whose middle grade and young adult novels deserve a spot at the top of your students' summer reading list. Continue reading...
We're pleased to announce that Vocabulary.com has launched a strategic partnership with Follett Corporation, which has provided students and teachers with quality educational material for more than 140 years. The initiative is part of the Follett Knowledge Fund, which is committed to supporting and developing new technology with the potential to improve student outcomes. Continue reading...
At Woodward Park Middle School in Columbus, Ohio, teachers were looking for a way to help out struggling students with literacy and turn around their scores on standardized tests. By adding Vocabulary.com as a literacy center in the language arts classroom, they saw immediate results. Continue reading...
Kudos to New York Times "Big City" columnist Gina Bellafante for invoking an ancient "-claim" when she referred to Dorothy Rabinowitz's deununciations of the Citi Bike bike-sharing program in New York as "declaimed absurdities." Continue reading...
How do words enter our lexicon? Which ones survive in our language? Which ones die? Forensic linguist Dr. Allan Metcalf has developed a method to predict the success or failure of a word that's almost foolproof. English professor and registrar of MacMurray College in Illinois, Allan is also the Executive Secretary of the American Dialect Society, which famously announces their annual Word of the Year. It is this exercise that served as the catalyst for Allan's investigations, which he explains in his book Predicting New Words. We spoke to him about his fascinating findings, and, of course, the Word of the Year: Continue reading...
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, has been writing a language column for the last couple of years for The Boston Globe (and before that for The New York Times Magazine). Now he is starting a new language column for The Wall Street Journal called "Word on the Street." Each week he will focus on a word in the news and examine its history. In his first column, he looks at how cyber is showing up with increasing frequency as a noun. Check it out here. Continue reading...