Is fritter a delicious fried pastry? Or what you did when you spent your inheritance on Botox and truffles? If contemporary means “belonging to the present time,” how come you can’t use it interchangeably with current, as in “Change the channel––the contemporary show is boring as all get out”?

Learn fritter, contemporary, and nine other context-sensitive words in a new list in the Test Prep category, Words You Need to See in the Wild.

Take on Ten Words from Today's NY Times - Mar. 27, 2012.

Then see Vocabulary Begets Vocabulary: The More You Know, the More You Learn to understand why learning these words will help you absorb even more as you read.

When, in a CNN interview, Mitt Romney's senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom was asked about the possibility of Romney's recent conservative positions alienating independent voters in a general election, and Fehrnstrom said, "It’s almost like an Etch a Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again," he was using a very powerful (and dangerous) tool: a simile.

See the Vocabulary.com Dictionary page for simile to review what a simile is, where it comes from, and what distinguishes one from a metaphor.

If you saw last week’s Ten Words from Today’s Times, you know that amplify made an appearance, through a Goldman Sachs spokesperson quoted as saying: “It is unfortunate that an individual opinion about Goldman Sachs is amplified in a newspaper.” The following day, amplify showed up in The New York Times again, in this instance when a founder of an app called CityMaps said of the decision to include store-fronts’ Twitter feeds in the information it displays: “We want to amplify that messaging. You don’t sit down and follow 30 bars on Twitter.”

Is it possible that in our age of Internet-driven amplification we might want to check in on the multiple meanings and senses of this old but newly useful word? It's easy to do: just visit the amplify page in the Vocabulary.com Dictionary, spend some time noodling around amplify's blurb, word family diagram, and usage examples. And then click "Learn" to add it to your Challenge queue.

With March Madness under way and the AMC "Mad Men" premiere scheduled to air this Sunday night, the usage example tracker on our Dictionary page for the word mad is going, well, mad!

Take on Ten Words from Today's Times - Mar. 8, 2012 in an epic battle: you versus the morning paper.

Then see Vocabulary Begets Vocabulary: The More You Know, the More You Learn to understand why learning these words will help you absorb even more as you read.

On this Super Tuesday morning, check out the Vocabulary.com Dictionary definition page for super. Aside from the glut of usage examples surrounding super pac and Super Tuesday, the page is filled with clues as to how this fairly neutral Latin adverb and preposition for "above," "over," or "beyond" acquired its perky yet powerful aftertaste.

(For the whole story on super, see Vocabulary.com lexicographer Ben Zimmer's meditation on the word here.)