Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Vocabulary
For the latest installment of Slate's podcast Lexicon Valley, I look at how the seemingly random number eighty-six became a verb meaning to get rid of something, thanks to a long-forgotten code of hash houses and soda-fountain lunch counters.
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Dept. of Word Lists
Vocabulary Lists from the Hottest YA Reads
Teach vocab from the books teens are actually reading.
The great news about today's young adult literature boom is that teens are not just reading, they are reading insatiably. Using Vocabulary.com, teachers can turn the reading students are already doing into academic gains.
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Tips & Tricks
Turn Any Current Event into a Word Learning Event
Use VocabGrabber to transform news articles into vocab-based current events mini lessons.
Teachers: How many times does this happen? You pass out copies of an engaging news story, assign your students to read it for homework, and then lead a spirited 10-minute discussion of the article at the beginning of class the next day. If your answer is "Not often enough," you are not alone.
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Blog Excerpts
When "Banishing Boring Words," Avoid "Synonym-itis"
Before declaring words to be "dead," make sure students know what livelier alternatives mean.
Following a Wall Street Journal article poking gentle fun at a movement to strike overused words such as good, bad, and nice from student writing, Slate Senior Editor Gabriel Roth warned that a "reasonable pedagogical technique" had morphed into "perverse and deadly totalitarianism." For middle school English teachers, we suggest some middle ground.
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
A Student's "Hamilton" Vocabulary List Leads to a Brush With Fame
After sharing her list on Twitter, Katelyn Leech watched it go viral.
A few days after high school senior Katelyn "Lyn" Leech posted a list she'd created from the Broadway hit Hamilton using the Vocabulary.com list builder, her Twitter notifications went through the roof. She knew something was up, but it wasn't until she logged on that she saw what it was. Hamilton creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) had tweeted Lyn's list to his large following.
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The latest episode of Slate's podcast Lexicon Valley is a hoot and a half, as I take a look at the origins of hootenanny, a word that emerged from rural America with many meanings before finding fame as a name for folk-music gatherings.
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Dept. of Word Lists
"Thrice for the United States of America"! GOP Debate or Renaissance Fair?
Vocab choices lend dramatic flair to otherwise technical discussion of policy.
The fourth Republican debate was, in terms of content, an exploration of the future of the United States economy. Linguistically, however, it was a bit of a throwback. Several of the candidates used words and phrases that can strike the modern ear as a bit antiquated.
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