Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from November, 2012
Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Lists of the Week: Classic Literature, New Lists
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Crucible, and Of Mice and Men
We've added several new literature-based Vocabulary Lists to our collection. Check out Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Crucible, and Of Mice and Men. Remember: these Lists are interactive, which means learning them feels like a game.
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It's been about three months since I started my job as a teaching assistant at the University of Pittsburgh. Since doing so, I've not just left behind Brooklyn for the 'Burgh, and "Fuhgedaboutit" for "Yinz want some food?"; I've also adapted my vocabulary, too. The words I use in my classroom now are different from when I taught high school. This is a challenge, and one I've been interested to watch my students — all first-semester freshmen — take on, as well.
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Blog Excerpts
Scandal at the OED? Not So Much
Earlier this week, an article in the Guardian reported that "an eminent former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins and bizarrely blamed previous editors." But it turns out that this seemingly sensational story is "completely bogus," according to OED editor at large Jesse Sheidlower. Read Sheidlower's explanation on The New Yorker's Culture Desk blog here. (Update, 12/3: Our own Ben Zimmer has a column about the pseudo-controversy on the New York Times op/ed page.)
Last week we brought you an excerpt from Constance Hale's new book, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing, focusing on the power of phrasal verbs. In this second part, Hale looks at just how productive those "fertile phrasals" have grown to be.
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Ten Words from Today's NY Times - Nov. 28, 2012
Ten Words from Today's NY Times - Nov. 28, 2012
Learn Ten Words from Today's Times - Nov. 28, 2012.
Then see "Vocabulary Begets Vocabulary: The More You Know, the More You Learn" to understand why learning these words will help you absorb even more as you read.
Retailers, not content with branding products, have lately taken to branding days of the week, as a way to hype the holiday shopping rush. "Black Friday," the name for the day after Thanskgiving, was transformed from a negative to a positive by some clever etymological mythologizing (make that etymythologizing). Then the Monday after Thanksgiving was christened "Cyber Monday," and now some marketers would like to extend that to a "Cyber Week."
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Under the HoodThe science of vocabulary building
Getting Into the Vocabulary Habit
Making habits work for you
At Vocabulary.com, we get a consistent message from our users. They're "addicted" to the Vocabulary.com Challenge. Recently, we took a look at the best-selling book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg to try to understand why.
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