Articles about Online

The lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary are plumbing a new source for language use: Twitter. Hear how the OED is making use of ephemeral "tweets" from Editor at Large Jesse Sheidlower, on the public radio program Future Tense.

Topics: Vocabulary Dictionaries Online Words

Earlier this week I appeared as a guest on the NPR show "Charlotte Talks" (from Charlotte, North Carolina) to talk about language in the electronic age. Callers expressed a fair amount of hand-wringing about how English usage is under fire from new modes of communication, from text-messaging to social media sites. Rather than focusing on the negative, I'd like to celebrate some of the innovative linguistic forms that have been bubbling up online. Continue reading...

Topics: Vocabulary Online Words Usage

Is a picture worth a thousand words? Possibly, but if your job is to assign words to pictures, it would be good if you could reduce that number a bit, and perhaps focus on quality rather than quantity. This month in the Lounge we've been thinking about the relationship between words and pictures, while in recovery from a brief addiction to Google Image Labeler. Continue reading...

Topics: Vocabulary Linguistics Online Language

Forvo is a new website where you can find a huge array of words pronounced in their original languages. Native speakers can upload their own pronunciations — it's "crowdsourcing" at its best.

Topics: Vocabulary Online Language Words

Should words like podcast, Bluetooth, and crowdsourcing be included in mainstream dictionaries? Computerworld talks to leading lexicographers about which high-tech terms make the cut.

Topics: Vocabulary Online Words

It's hard to keep up with techie terms these days. Last week, Apple Inc. announced it would no longer use the word push to describe the way that its new online MobileMe service communicates to personal computers and electronic devices like the iPhone. Turns out the service wasn't always "pushing" data to "the cloud" as quickly as users were expecting. To which non-technophiles would probably say, "Huh?" Continue reading...

Topics: Vocabulary Online Words

We've been thinking about the data cloud in the Lounge these days. "What data cloud?" you may ask, and well that you should: it's a term relatively new to English and it hasn't yet settled down to a single fixed meaning. The data cloud we've been thinking about is the Big One: the nebulous dataset consisting of all the data that is, in principle, at your fingertips when they are poised above an Internet-connected keyboard. Continue reading...

Topics: Vocabulary Online Language

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Vocabulary Teachers Students

Vocabulary.com Blog

Blog Excerpts

The OED is All a-Twitter

Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon

The Language of Social Media: "Unlike" Any Other

Language LoungeA Monthly Column for Word Lovers

Safe Search is Off

Blog Excerpts

Pronouncing the World's Words

Blog Excerpts

Taking in Tech Terms

Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon

Pushing to the Cloud: Weird Wireless Words

Language LoungeA Monthly Column for Word Lovers

The Data Cloud

The OED is All a-Twitter

Pronouncing the World's Words

Taking in Tech Terms

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