Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Vocabulary
Last night, Jon Stewart announced that he will be retiring from Comedy Central's The Daily Show. We'll miss Stewart and his writing team for lots of reasons. But as dedicated vocabularians, we'll be especially sorry to see the end of Stewart's skewering of overhyped news through clever use of word blending, known as portmanteaus.
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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.
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Blog Excerpts
A Junior Dictionary Kerfuffle
"The lexicographic kerfuffle, thank goodness, isn't dead," writes Stefan Fatsis in The New Yorker. Fatsis is referring to the recent controversy over the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which has substituted all-natural words like "almond," "blackberry," and "minnow," with such 21st-century fare as "blog," "chatroom," and "database." Some noted writers have said they are "profoundly alarmed" by the changes. Read all about it here.
Vocabulary Shout-Out
For "The Americans" Season Opener, Get Your "Tradecraft" On
This insider's word for spy work is increasingly popular and well known
In a review of FX's Cold War-era thriller "The Americans," which begins its third season tonight, New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley expects her readers to know what she means by the term tradecraft. Though many believe this to be a term invented by John le Carré, it's been in use by spies since the 1950s at least.
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Topics:
Vocabulary
Language allows us to communicate the ideas in our heads with other people. It is a main way we connect with the world around us. Because of that, language becomes very personal to each user. We form affinities for individual words because of what they mean to us.
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Six years running, the logophiles at Wayne State University, a.k.a. the Wayne State Word Warriors, have curated a crowd-sourced list of rare words that "deserve a bit more love." These are words that used to be commonly known and are still useful, but have started to drop out of the English lexicon. Wayne State Warriors' mission? To bring them back.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
In a First, the Word of the Year is a Hashtag: "#blacklivesmatter"
The American Dialect Society made its 25th annual selection for Word of the Year, and for the first time the winner was actually a Twitter hashtag: #blacklivesmatter. Even though the socially conscious slogan is formed by combining three words, as a hashtag it was converted into something linguistically innovative, attracting the attention of the assorted language scholars who gathered for the vote at the society's annual meeting in Portland, Oregon.
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