Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Usage
Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she tackles the question of how plural pants got transformed into singular pant.
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Lately the Northern Californian slang word hella has been in the news, thanks to a well-publicized Facebook petition to make it the official prefix for 10 to the 27th power. Here we present a first-hand account of the cultural significance of hella from Samantha Strimling, a young journalist about to graduate from Piedmont High School in the San Francisco Bay area. We were pleased to make Samantha's acquaintance at a recent Visual Thesaurus presentation to the Columbia Scholastic Press Association.
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Last Sunday I responded to an intriguing question from a reader of the New York Times Magazine "On Language" column, dealing with a meaning of the word revert that was previously unfamiliar to me. As I discovered, revert can mean "reply" in a number of varieties of world English, particularly the English of the Indian subcontinent. But revert is hardly the only English word that has moved on a special trajectory in Indian English.
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The NBA playoffs have long been the highlight of my television year, and like so many other boob tube productions, they produce their share of euphemisms.
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Would you still purchase a "3-piece European-style outdoor bistro set" if you had to pay a "European-style value-added-tax" on it? This month in the Lounge we look at the changing fortunes of all things European.
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It's hard to imagine the English language without the word cool as a colloquial description of someone or something first-rate. Over the past half-century of usage, the word has become so omnipresent that it has lost much of its slangy patina. Slang-watcher Connie Eble noted here that when she asks her students at the University of North Carolina to list items of slang, they don't even think of cool, since "it's just ordinary vocabulary for them." How did cool first break through to the mainstream?
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Thanks to Chatroulette, the ridiculously popular website that pairs random strangers around the world for webcam conversations, we have a new verb in English: to next. Two language-related blogs explain what it means.
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