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Say What You Mean: Synonyms for Strong Writing
Learn Alternatives to Overused, Misused, and Imprecise Words
Expand your vocabulary and communicate more effectively with curated synonym lists designed to teach the subtle nuances of language.
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In our summer reading series, Vocabulary.com gets up close and personal with the authors of some of our favorite books about summer. In the final installment we talk with author and editor Lamar Giles, whose middle grade and young adult novels deserve a spot at the top of your students' summer reading lists.
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In our summer reading series, Vocabulary.com gets up close and personal with the authors of some of our favorite books about summer. In this installment we talk with award-winning author Kekla Magoon, whose middle grade and young adult novels deserve a spot at the top of your students' summer reading list.
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Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
Getting the Low-down on Up-classify
A word lesson compliments of the F.B.I's email investigation
Reporting on his investigation of Hillary Clinton's email use, F.B.I. Director James B. Comey mentioned several times that the F.B.I. engaged in up-classifying emails.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
"They" Won! Gender-Neutral Pronoun is 2015 Word of the Year
Gathering in Washington D.C. for its annual meeting, the American Dialect Society has made its 26th annual selection for Word of the Year. And as predicted in this space last month, the winner is a lowly pronoun: they used as a gender-neutral alternative to he and she, with special attention paid to its use as an expression of "non-binary" gender identity.
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Following the enormously successful release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Slate's words correspondent Katy Waldman raised a question, "Why are they called the Avengers? What are they avenging?" This put us in mind of lexicographer Neal Whitman's observation a few years back that, at least in movies, "Avenging and vengeance are for good guys, while revenge is for the bad guys."
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
A Novelist Breaks Her Own "100-Dollar Word" Rule
National Book Award nominee Karen Joy Fowler on building a character with a larger vocabulary than her own
Karen Joy Fowler's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (now shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize as well) is narrated by a character with an outsize vocabulary. Here, Fowler speaks with Vocabulary.com about the process of finding the words to create that character and the fun of breaking the rule, "Never use a 100-dollar word when a one-dollar word will do."
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