Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2012
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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Blog Excerpts
Back in Black: On the Origins of "Black Friday"
"Black" doesn't refer to retailers' books
On Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, Americans kick off the holiday shopping season with a bang. In his Word Routes column last year, lexicographer Ben Zimmer explored the origins of the phrase "Black Friday." It is not, as many believe, the day when retailers' balance sheets change from red to black.
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We're pleased to present another excerpt from Constance Hale's entertaining new book, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing. Here she focuses on phrasal verbs, "the verbal combos that join an action word with a tiny preposition or particle to make a whole new meaning."
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