People often use the word bemuse when they mean amuse, but to amuse is to entertain, and to bemuse is to confuse. In Alice in Wonderland, the White Rabbit amuses Alice as he frolics, but then the Cheshire Cat bemuses her when he tells her to go two directions at once. Continue reading...
For National Reading Month, Time's Katy Steinmetz gives us "9 Great Things to Read in (Roughly) 9 Minutes," a column devoted to reading in contexts other than great books of the "big, blubbery" Moby Dick variety. Continue reading...
Voracious describes someone super hungry, like a zombie or a wolf. A voracious appetite makes you want to eat a whole cake. Veracious (with an "e") means truthful, as in a veracious first president who cannot tell a lie. Continue reading...
Vocabulary.com for iPad and iPhone hit the #1 spot in the educational app category a day after launch, and reviewers agree. Move over, Candy Crush. Vocabulary.com is a crazy fun addiction you can feel good about. Continue reading...
The Oxford English Dictionary's recent quarterly update added, as usual, as assortment of terms from all over the map. These included ethnomathematics, honky-tonker, honor code, exfoliator, bookaholic, over-under, wackadoo, and the even wackier wackadoodle. But the entry that really caught my eye was bestie, an affectionate term for a best friend. Continue reading...
Since launching Vocabulary.com, we've been thrilled to see how the online word-learning system has grown by leaps and bounds, attracting millions of users (including over half a million registered users and students in more than 11,000 schools nationwide). As the premiere site for vocabulary learning, Vocabulary.com has received recognition from the likes of USA Today, the New York Times, and Time. And today we're excited to announce the next step in the evolution of Vocabulary.com: an app that brings the adaptive learning system and the powerful dictionary that supports it to the palm of your hands. Continue reading...
What's the quickest way to get your school to show up on our daily and monthly leaderboards? Eliminate invisible play by checking that all your students have registered their accounts with your school. Continue reading...
Anyone traveling New York City's Park Avenue this spring will have the chance to contemplate the meaning of the word maelstrom, thanks to a sculpture by artist Alice Aycock described by the The New York Times, as "a spiky assemblage of aluminum ribbons that stretches for some 70 feet." Continue reading...
Decimate. Literally. Hopefully. These words, and others like them, provoke so much ire in some readers that they become troublesome to use. Critics feel that the writer is using the word in an unauthorized way, that it's being using to mean what it does not mean. Continue reading...
Follow this week's news coverage from a vocabularian's perspective by learning 10 words from this week's New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage. Continue reading...