Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Words
With the Super Bowl just around the corner, our own Ben Zimmer talked to Seattle's KUOW about the origins of some football language. Some of the terms, like "the 12th man" and "the Legion of Boom," have special resonance in Seattle, home of the Super Bowl-bound Seahawks.
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Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
Made Up: Fictional, Fictitious, Fictive, and Factitious
Choose wisely, or risk saying something you don't mean.
When coming up with adjectives for made-up things, we have many to choose among: fictional, fictitious, or fictive, or even factitious. Choose wisely, or risk saying something you don't mean.
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In the spirit of New Year's resolutions like quit smoking, lose weight, exercise more, each January brings new calls to ban words, the linguistic equivalent of losing weight. But while New Year's resolutions are self-imposed — I decide that an hour on the elliptical watching Sherlock would be better than an hour on the couch with Sherlock and a bowl of chips — word bans tend to be imposed by someone else.
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When Run Run Shaw, a giant of the Hong Kong entertainment industry, died earlier this month at the ripe old age of 106, I took the opportunity to look at a term with which he was intimately connected: kung fu. In the 1970s, martial-arts movies from the Shaw Brothers studio (and its Hong Kong rival, Golden Harvest) firmly planted kung fu in the global consciousness. But I was surprised to learn that kung fu as we know it was actually born on American soil.
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Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About Language
Selfie's Children: The Productive "-fie" Suffix
To many, the selfie — a picture of yourself, taken by yourself and shared on social media — is a sign of rampant narcissism. I tend to share that belief. Even before I heard the word, I thought there was something mentally amiss with my Facebook friends who posted over a hundred head shots of themselves. However, as a lexicographer, I have to admit the selfie trend is now broader than the self.
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Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About Language
Why is the Word of the Year "Because"? Because...
For 24 years, the American Dialect Society has chosen a Word of the Year at its annual meeting in January. Typically, the word has been a noun or verb that has risen to prominence during the previous year. But this year, strong candidates such as selfie and twerk ultimately lost to a word that isn't a noun, verb, or adjective; doesn't describe some cultural phenomenon; and has been in continuous use in English for more than 700 years: because. How did that happen?
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Evasive ManeuversEuphemisms old and new
Inappropriate and Uncertain Difficulties with Personal Deportment
I hate inappropriate and uncertain events. Don't you? So does the American College of Cardiology. An article about that group reveals a lame-o lexical band-aid: "The cardiology group replaced the 'Inappropriate' label with 'Rarely Appropriate.' Another category—cases in which there's medical doubt—will switch from 'Uncertain' to 'May be Appropriate.'"
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