Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from January, 2014
Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
"Because" Wins 2013 Word of the Year Vote, Because Awesome
Leading up to the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year vote last night, handicappers might have favored such terms as selfie, twerk, or Obamacare as possible winners. But the society's selection was a bit of a surprise: the humble word because, which has recently expanded in new grammatical directions in informal use online.
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At the American Dialect Society's annual conference in Minneapolis, we have nominated words in various categories in our Word of the Year selection. I presided over the nominating session on Thursday in my capacity as chair of the society's New Words Committee. Winners will be selected from the different categories on Friday evening, culminating in the vote for the overall Word of the Year. Here's the list of nominees.
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Most people think they know what cupidity means. But because of a Red Herring morphology clue, most people are wrong.
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On New Year's Day 1959, New York Times readers woke to headlines about a communist takeover in Cuba. Learn ten words that defined that moment here.
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