Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Words
Have you browsed through a dictionary (the kind printed on paper) lately? If you have, the publishers of it are probably glad you did, while being aware that you may be part of a dying breed. This month the Lounge is the first of a two-parter examining some implications of dictionary-making in the digital age.
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"Swine flu is the new Susan Boyle of search terms," announces a headline in Australia's The Age. The Scottish singing sensation was last week's news: people are no longer busy conducting online searches for Ms. Boyle (or for her favored expression, gobsmacked). Instead, they're trying to discover anything they can about swine flu, now that health authorities are warning of a possible pandemic. Let's take a look at how the disease got its name.
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Blog Excerpts
A Million Words? Not So Fast...
Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer explains to Washington Post Book World why the claim that English is adding its millionth word lacks credibility.
Forbes.com is running a special report on neologisms — all about how and why new words enter the language. And the Visual Thesaurus family is well-represented, with featured articles by editor Ben Zimmer and contributor Mark Peters.
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Once again we have asked writer and educator Bob Greenman to select some words to mull over from his latest guide to vocabulary enrichment, More Words That Make a Difference, co-authored with his wife Carol. The book illustrates word usage with passages from the Atlantic Monthly, and Bob takes a look here at words used by one of the Atlantic's most famous editors.
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Unless you've been living under an Internet-free rock, you've probably seen the enthralling video of Scotland's Susan Boyle singing on the television show Britain's Got Talent. According to the latest numbers, the video of Boyle's performance has already attracted more than 100 million online views. But it's not only her singing prowess that is attracting worldwide attention: it has also been reported that "Web searches for the term gobsmacked spiked after Boyle used the British slang meaning utterly astonished when describing her reaction to newfound widespread acclaim."
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Today's Mailbag Friday question comes all the way from Dakar, Senegal. Jodi W. asks: "What's up with texted? As in, 'I texted her yesterday.' Is it a real word?"
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