Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2014
Vocabulary Shout-Out
"Aladdin" Jafar Styled for Broadway as "Epicene Menace"
A Disney villains one virtue may be teaching us the meaning of an unusual word
Reviewing Disney's new Broadway adaptation of Aladdin, New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood describes Jonathan Freeman's Jafar as an "epicene menace." Let's take a look at what epicene through a picture of Jafar.
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Dept. of Word Lists
A Quick Current Events Quiz: Al Qaeda "Indoctrination" in Syria and More
Follow this news story and others from a vocabularian's perspective
Follow this week's news coverage from a vocabularian's perspective by learning 10 words from this week's New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage.
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Is it possible to take vocabulary expansion too far? In a piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Bernstein points out the situations where word-knowledge can work against you, making the point that "language junkies" might want to be careful lest they alienate people they're trying to impress, or just render themselves incomprehensible.
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Topics:
Vocabulary
Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
Word Tasting Note: "Varmint"
We all know what this: the fauna equivalent of a weed.
We all know what a varmint is, thanks to Yosemite Sam (and others). It's an annoying animal (or person), the fauna equivalent of a weed. It's something (or someone) who takes your nice, tidy set-up, your lovely garden or lawn or your livestock, and makes a mess of it. Before you had a good environment; now you have a nasty varmint.
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The issues surrounding the Russian state and the area of Ukraine known as Crimea involve centuries of history and complex issues of sovereignty and self-determination. In an effort to untangle at least some of these issues, we've made a list of 60 vocabulary words drawn from Putin's speech of March 18, 2014.
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Topics:
Vocabulary
Tips & Tricks
True or False: Vocabulary.com Picks Words Just for You
Age and education have nothing to do with what words you'll see
Quick Quiz: Vocabulary.com assigns you harder or easier words A) based on information you input about your grade in school or education level, or B) by assessing your performance and then personalizing your learning experience based on what it knows about you.
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Yesterday, March 23, 2014, marked the 175th anniversary of a word that may be the most widely used expression in the world: "OK." MacMurray College English professor Allan Metcalf says "OK" is America's greatest export and debunks the various origin theories surrounding it.
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