Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Words
Much of the media narrative leading up to today's wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton has focused on Kate's "commoner" background, particularly her mother's family, hailing from the humble coal-mining country of northern England. In class-conscious British society, differences in social background come through in speech patterns -- as anyone who's seen "My Fair Lady" knows. So how have the royal family and the middle-class Middletons navigated this tricky linguistic terrain?
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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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John Pollack makes a case for the cultural significance of the lowly pun in his new book, The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics. Pollack, a former presidential speechwriter, was also the winner of the 1995 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships, in Austin, Texas. In this excerpt, Pollack describes the first round of the competition.
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It's not every day that an obscure word like consubstantial becomes a topic of hot debate. But this week The New York Times reported that a new English translation of the liturgy used for the Roman Catholic Mass is prompting complaints about the difficulty of the revised language, and consubstantial is Exhibit Number One for the critics.
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Recently on Slate, University of Delaware English professor Ben Yagoda tackled "the 'nonplussed' problem": How long should we cling to a word's original meaning? (Nonplussed, for instance, has changed its meaning for many people from "perplexed" to "unfazed.")
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In the past few months, Americans have probably heard more about collective bargaining than in the past few decades. I've heard and read the term collective bargaining so much recently that it has gotten me thinking about the strange nature of English gerunds.
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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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