Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2012
Blog Excerpts
The Cy Young Winner with a Thesaurus in His Locker
The knuckleballer R.A. Dickey of the New York Mets has won the National League's Cy Young Award, given to the league's best pitcher. We've been Dickey fans ever since we learned that he keeps a dictionary and a thesaurus in his locker. At the beginning of the 2011 baseball season, Ben Zimmer devoted a Word Routes column to Dickey, who had already emerged as a fan favorite, "not just for his way with a knuckleball, but for his way with words." Read it here.
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Ten Words from Today's NY Times - November 14, 2012
Ten Words from Today's NY Times - November 14, 2012
Learn Ten Words from Today's Times - November 14, 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.
Blog Excerpts
Words of the Year, from Oxford
It's hard to believe but it's already the time when dictionary programs begin selecting their "Words of the Year." Oxford University Press has selected one Word of the Year for the UK and one for the US. The UK word is omnishambles ("a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged"), while the US word is the acronymic verb GIF ("to create a GIF file of an image or video sequence, especially relating to an event"). The UK announcement is here, and the US announcement is here.
Looking at the morphology — or the make-up — of words is a well established vocabulary-learning strategy, and one component of the new Common Core standards for English Language Arts. Enter Power Prefix Vocabulary Lists, ten new lists to teach some basic building blocks of word morphology.
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Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth planted an inspirational seed in 5th grade teacher Francesca Leibowitz's mind: "What if our class were to grow a Word Orchard by planting roots and affixes? And what if the fruits of our labor (pun fully intended) were those morphemes' derivatives?"
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Read Globally, Learn Locally
Vocabulary.com Joins Queen of Water Global Read
English and Social Studies teachers, take note: Vocabulary.com is taking part in a Global Read of the acclaimed novel Queen of Water by Laura Resau, sponsored by the Massachusetts-based curriculum developer Primary Source.
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In the leadup to President Obama's win over Mitt Romney, a number of political commentators described the presidential race as not just "tight" but "razor-tight." Ultimately, the razor-tight description was apt in such battleground states as Ohio, Florida, and Virginia, but not so much in the overall electoral results. But wait a minute: why razor-tight?
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