Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Language
Last week, an exciting new tool for analyzing the history of language and culture was unveiled by Google. They call it the "Ngram Viewer," and it's an interface to study the enormous corpus of historical texts scanned by Google Books. The Ngram Viewer was rolled out in conjunction with a paper in the journal Science introducing the field of "culturomics." Dennis Baron has weighed in on the significance of this development for researchers. But what about those peculiar words, culturomics and ngram?
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Once again award-winning writer and educator Bob Greenman takes us on a journey through words selected from More Words That Make a Difference, a delightful book illustrating word usage with passages from the Atlantic Monthly.
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As 2010 winds down, word-watchers are reflecting on a year of vuvuzelas and robo-signers, gleeks and mama grizzlies. Let's take a look back at some of the lexical highlights from the past year.
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There's a new campaign to boost awareness of U.S. public libraries that goes by the curious name, "Geek the Library." I'm all for the campaign's stated mission of improving public perceptions of libraries by championing their importance to local communities. But what really fascinates me is the way they're using geek as a transitive verb to mean "be geekily enthusiastic about." I guess you could say I geek innovative uses of the word geek.
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We welcome back Fitch O'Connell, a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, working for the British Council in Portugal and other European countries. Here Fitch considers one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the English-language classroom: the dastardly phrasal verb.
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A sighting of a "corrections institution" has us thinking about the gamut of terms used for the punishment end of the criminal justice system.
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Last Sunday I wrote an On Language column for The New York Times Magazine about the editorial we, and all the sarcastic jokes that have been made about the presumptuous pronoun. "Nameless authors of editorials may find the pronoun we handy for representing the voice of collective wisdom," I wrote, "but their word choice opens them up to charges of gutlessness and self-importance." Since the column appeared, some of those voices of collective wisdom have risen to defend themselves.
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