Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from February, 2015
Last night, Jon Stewart announced that he will be retiring from Comedy Central's The Daily Show. We'll miss Stewart and his writing team for lots of reasons. But as dedicated vocabularians, we'll be especially sorry to see the end of Stewart's skewering of overhyped news through clever use of word blending, known as portmanteaus.
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If you've been keeping up with the latest Vocabulary.com news, you may have noticed that we've introduced information-rich dashboards for teachers and administrators in schools that have signed up for our Educator Edition. We wanted to share that data-driven goodness with all Vocabulary.com users, and so we've rolled out new features to monitor your progress and identify where you're having trouble.
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Vocabulary.com News
Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
Here's a Pop Quiz: Where the Heck Did "Quiz" Come From?
For Slate's Lexicon Valley podcast, Ben Zimmer delves into the mysterious origins of quiz and its long-forgotten brother quoz.
Quiz is a word with a background so baffling it might make you feel a bit quizzical. For Slate's Lexicon Valley podcast, I delve into the mysterious origins of quiz and its long-forgotten brother quoz.
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We're pleased to announce that Vocabulary.com has launched a strategic partnership with Follett Corporation, which has provided students and teachers with quality educational material for more than 140 years. The initiative is part of the Follett Knowledge Fund, which is committed to supporting and developing new technology with the potential to improve student outcomes.
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Vocabulary.com News
Our To Kill a Mockingbird interactive word lists are among our most popular. But there's another kind of vocabulary you'll find in To Kill a Mockingbird: Southern-inflected words that testify to the more-defined regional nature of American English as it was spoken three quarters of a century ago. And with the news that Harper Lee will release a recently rediscovered novel written previous to To Kill a Mockingbird, we can only hope to find a rich store of Southern-inflected words there as well.
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Turns out the American Dialect Society callously disregarded my selection of conscious uncoupling (Gwyneth Paltrow's cuckoo-bananas term for divorce) for Euphemism of the Year. Instead, these linguists, lexicographers, word mavens, and rogue wordanistas selected EIT: an abbreviation of enhanced interrogation techniques, which is a euphemism of a euphemism.
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
For Black History Month, Teach #blacklivesmatter
A free lesson plan built around student engagement
In January, the American Dialect Society made history by selecting a hashtag, #blacklivesmatter, as its Word of the Year. The choice inspired composition professors at St. John's University in Queens, Professor Sophie Bell and Professor Amanda Moulder to create a lesson plan around the ADS's #blacklivesmatter selection, bringing attention to race and language in a way that feels relevant to students' lives. To kick off Black History Month, we're sharing the lesson plan they created.
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Teaching
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