Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Vocabulary
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. Here Bob introduces us to a dextrous slicer of lox and the world of "appetizing."
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The prolific British language writer, David Crystal, has produced another winner: A Little Book of Language (now out in paperback), which Publishers Weekly calls "the perfect primer for anyone interested in the subject." In this excerpt, Crystal explains how language changes, from vocabulary to grammar.
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Today is Earth Day, the annual celebration launched 41 years ago to raise environmental awareness. What better time to get up to speed with the latest in "green" lingo? Here are ten eco-friendly words that have gained prominence over the last few years.
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The OED has put ♥ into the dictionary, along with such internet terms as OMG. At least that's what the headlines are screaming, and commentators world-wide have been praising or damning the dictionary editors' decision to go both graphic and digital.
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The baseball season is in full swing now, and as a long-suffering fan of the New York Mets, I've learned to content myself with the small pleasures of the game. The Mets started the season with a road trip, going 3-3 — not bad, I'll take it. Pitching in today's home opener at Citi Field is R.A. Dickey, who has emerged as a fan favorite, not just for his way with a knuckleball, but for his way with words.
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The latest update to the Oxford English Dictionary has attracted a flurry of media interest, though much of the coverage has been misleading or downright inaccurate. We take a look at some of the more reasoned reactions to the inclusion of such new items as OMG, LOL, and heart (as a transitive verb, not as a symbol).
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When the American Dialect Society selected app as the 2010 Word of the Year, it was a nod to the tech term's sudden ubiquity over the past year or two. And now it's more contested than ever with Apple locked in litigation with two rivals, Microsoft and Amazon, in an attempt to hold on to a trademark for app store. How did we get to the point where, as the Apple slogan goes, "there's an app for that" (regardless of whose store you buy it from)?
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