Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from May, 2015
Here are the names of three products currently sold in stores and online: Pout Polish, Pout-à-Porter, Pout-o-matic. Here are three business names from around the United States: Kool Smiles, Smileworks, Smile Wide. And here's a question: What do those names tell you about what's being sold and to whom?
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Lose sounds like snooze. If you lose something, you don’t have it anymore. Add an “o” and loose rhymes with goose and describes something that’s not attached.
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Warning! These similar sounding words have very different meanings. To prescribe is to recommend and to proscribe is to forbid. One little letter makes a big difference.
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
Sibling Strife? A Word You Don't Know Might Explain Why
It's softer than anger but more complicated than envy.
Here at Vocabulary.com, we are constantly on the lookout for funky and impressively obscure words deserving of a comeback. Case in point: emulous, a fantastic word that gives us the ability to describe a feeling that dogs many of us all through life and yet is very hard to pinpoint.
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The weather is getting warmer, so you might start to see men arrayed in stylishly rumpled seersucker suits (especially in the American South). On the latest installment of Slate's podcast Lexicon Valley, I followed the thread of seersucker all the way back to its Persian roots, and then looked at how both the fabric and the word spread around the world.
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Following the enormously successful release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Slate's words correspondent Katy Waldman raised a question, "Why are they called the Avengers? What are they avenging?" This put us in mind of lexicographer Neal Whitman's observation a few years back that, at least in movies, "Avenging and vengeance are for good guys, while revenge is for the bad guys."
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Lying is one of those embarrassing things that demands euphemisms. No one wants to say "I lied" or "I fibbed" or "I wrote fan fiction." So when called on the carpet for a lie, people reach into the lexical abyss for euphemisms.
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