Articles about Books

Do you like sowing your wild oaks? Do you sometimes feel like a social leopard? Could you use a new leaf on life? Or do you just enjoy the infinite creativity of the English language, even when people make mistakes? If you answered yes to any of the above, you need to check out Robert Alden Rubin's terrific new book Going to Hell in a Hen Basket: An Illustrated Dictionary of Modern Malapropisms. Continue reading...

This week's publication of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee's long-dormant sequel of sorts to To Kill a Mockingbird, has gotten a tune running through my head: "Go Tell Aunt Rhody." Two titles, same number of syllables, and the same syntactic structure, right down to the use of go plus another verb right next to it. But how do both those verbs fit into the place where just one verb should go? Continue reading...

I've just finished reading Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility—not for the first time, probably for the fourth or fifth time. I started reading her when I was a teenager and I try to re-read one of her novels every year. They never disappoint, and at each stage of my life, I find new facets to explore in her analysis of human nature and relations, and in her unparalleled mastery of the expressiveness of English. Continue reading...

Have you ever struggled to explain a nuclear meltdown caused by an incredibly stupid mistake? You would have been grateful for alternative terms, such as "a core rearrangement caused by an ill-advised learning opportunity." You can find these terms and more in Spinglish: The Definitive Dictionary of Deliberately Deceitful Language. Continue reading...

On Vocabulary.com, we've got hundreds of learnable vocabulary lists for all of the books most commonly taught in schools. We're always keeping track of the most popular books that are being assigned to kids, to make sure that teachers will have the resources they need. Continue reading...

Our To Kill a Mockingbird interactive word lists are among our most popular. But there's another kind of vocabulary you'll find in To Kill a Mockingbird: Southern-inflected words that testify to the more-defined regional nature of American English as it was spoken three quarters of a century ago. And with the news that Harper Lee will release a recently rediscovered novel written previous to To Kill a Mockingbird, we can only hope to find a rich store of Southern-inflected words there as well. Continue reading...