Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Fun
Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
Presenting the Nominees for the 2012 Word of the Year
At the American Dialect Society's annual conference in Boston, we took a break from paper presentations to select nominations for the Word of the Year. As chair of the New Words Committee, I presided over the nominating session on Thursday. Winners will be selected from the different categories on Friday evening, culminating in the vote for the overall Word of the Year. Here's the list of nominees.
Continue reading...
Blog Excerpts
A Christmas Potpourri
If you're looking for some reading material this Yuletide season in between sips of eggnog, check out some Visual Thesaurus articles from Christmases past. Merrill Perlman explained the history of some seasonal expressions. Mike Pope considered phrases popularized by Christmas movies. Nancy Friedman told us about made-up holidays. And Ben Zimmer revealed the origins of "eggnog," holiday grog.
Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Ten Words from Today's NY Times - October 17, 2012
Ten Words from Today's NY Times - October 17, 2012
Learn Ten Words from Today's Times - October 17, 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.
Hi! Hey! Ho! Yo! Ahem. Good day, ladies and gentlemen, umm, I'd like to address you today about the silly little words that we, umm, use without knowing if they're words or not: words like hey, hi, ho, yo, ahem, and umm. Here's hoping you don't find the topic ho-hum. (Oy, is anyone out there listening?)
Continue reading...
In my most recent column for the Boston Globe, I poke fun at new advertising slogans that Apple is using for its iPod line: the latest iPod Nano is "Completely Renanoed," while the iPod Touch is "Engineered for Maximum Funness." Whereas renanoed at least shows a modicum of creativity (turning Nano into a verb capable of taking the re- prefix), funness seems to be an unnecessarily cutesy elaboration on plain old fun. But hang on: can we make a distinction between fun and funness?
Continue reading...
This week, there have been many celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the emoticon, the now-ubiquitous use of punctuation marks to mark emotion in online text. On September 19, 1982, at 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posted a message to a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board, proposing that :-) be used for marking jokes and :-( for non-jokes. Though Fahlman should get full credit for these pioneering smiley and frowny faces, there were in fact much earlier pioneers in expressive typography.
Continue reading...
Avast, ye mateys! Did you know that September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day? Arrrr, it's true! We've got some suggestions for sounding properly piratical.
Continue reading...
Sign up now (it’s free!)
Whether you’re a teacher or a learner,
Vocabulary.com can put you or your class
on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement.