Context collapse is cited by researchers as a reason friendships fall apart online, with only the Borg mind of Mark Zuckerberg to connect them. That certainly makes sense. If the only context we share is that we were in the same fourth-grade English class, and the teacher tossed the same erasers at us for talking in class, and we didn't even like each other much then, our context is thinner than a supermodel. Continue reading...
Writing for Slate, James S. Murphy explores the history of the flashcard, calling the Vocabulary.com app "the first significant improvement on the flashcard model of learning in 200 years." Continue reading...
In reimagining the 1959 film Sleeping Beauty, Disney had a great tool in their arsenal: the classic villain name "Maleficent," now elevated to title character. Continue reading...
High school grads: Before you start rocking out to "Pomp and Circumstance," make sure you're ready to receive a diploma from a vocabularian perspective. Continue reading...
It was another dramatic finish at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. After the 46 semifinalists were whittled down to the dozen contestants for last night's finals, I tweeted, "12 kids enter, 1 kid leaves." Little did I know that two kids would be named co-champions in the Bee's first tie since 1962. Continue reading...
It's time once again for the Scripps National Spelling Bee! Two hundred and eighty-one young spellers gathered near Washington, D.C. and sweated through the preliminary rounds yesterday. For the second year, those rounds included not just questions about the spelling of words but also their definitions. After all was said and done, 46 survived to advance to Thursday's semifinals. Continue reading...
The list is in! With college graduation season in full swing, members of the Vocabulary.com community collectively brainstormed #gradwords last week — defined as words you would give a recent college grad to set them up for success in life and work. Continue reading...
It's time once again for the Scripps National Spelling Bee! The preliminaries are today, and the nationally televised semifinals and finals are tomorrow (May 29). As in past years, our own Ben Zimmer will be live-tweeting the competition from the @VocabularyCom Twitter account and reporting on the results here in his Word Routes column. In the meantime, catch up on our coverage of the format changes introduced last year that brought vocabulary questions into the mix: here and here. Continue reading...
In a Washington Post review of a recent performance by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Robert Battey used the word velleity. Once you know what it means you may find yourself dropping it into everyday speech, but for one reader, learning new words is not what the news should be all about. Continue reading...
On the last Monday in May, Memorial Day is celebrated in the United States. But wait: is celebrated the right word? Would it be more appropriate to say Memorial Day is observed? Wendalyn Nichols, an experienced editor and lexicographer, guides us through this usage quandary. Continue reading...