Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant leads all films with 12 nominations for the 88th Academy Awards, and it has already racked up several Golden Globes. The movie has put the unusual word revenant on the tip of a lot of tongues, with many of us asking, "What the heck does it mean?" Continue reading...

A Vocabulary.com user reported this vocab-in-the-news moment today: He woke up to his clock-radio alarm in mid-Republican-presidential-debate recap, just in time to hear Governor Chris Christie call President Barack Obama a "feckless weakling." "Now that's some good vocabulary!" our user wrote in. Continue reading...

Lin-Manuel Miranda's mega-hit Broadway musical Hamilton is all about upending expectations. From its casting of actors of all races to play the all-white founding fathers, to its rap-heavy score, to its percussive style of storytelling, Hamilton turns traditions upside down, including traditions involving words. Continue reading...

While discussing her memoir "Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl" on NPR's Fresh Air, Sleater-Kinney co-founder Carrie Brownstein used the word inchoate to describe her younger self. Later in the interview, she used trenchant when she explained the Sleater-Kinney sound. To call attention to Brownstein's sensitive care with her word choices, we pulled inchoate, trenchant and eight other words into a vocabulary list. Continue reading...

While the mullet haircut takes us back in time, the word itself should not. Mullet was coined in the 1300s to refer to fish; the word's earliest use as a hairstyle name did not appear in print until 1994, when the Beastie Boys' "Mullet" "had a little story to tell/About a hair style that's way of life." Continue reading...

The Supreme Court has issued a decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, and as significant as that may be, as vocabularians, we can't get past the sighting of jiggery-pokery in Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion. Continue reading...

In the last year, Hollywood has brought a whole lot of vocabulary learning to the silver screen, from the minions of Despicable Me 2 fame, to a host of mal- words brought to mind by Maleficent , and the vocabulary-heavy Divergent/Insurgent franchise. This weekend, those of us who go to movies hoping to get scared out of our seats are offered Insidious: Chapter 3. Continue reading...