Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2015
Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
At Chavez HS, Vocabulary is a "Celebration of Community"
Levels of student engagement are taking even teachers by surprise.
At Chavez High School, which took home back-to-back monthly leaderboard wins in November and December, students and teachers are making word learning part of school culture and school pride. And the student engagement's taking even Chavez teachers by surprise.
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Topics:
Vocabulary Bowl
Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
A Far-Fetched Etymology That Seems a Little Cockamamie
Etymology can take some peculiar turns as a word criss-crosses different cultures. For the latest installment of Slate's Lexicon Valley podcast, I take the hosts along on the journey of the word cockamamie, which might seem stranger than fiction.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
In a First, the Word of the Year is a Hashtag: "#blacklivesmatter"
The American Dialect Society made its 25th annual selection for Word of the Year, and for the first time the winner was actually a Twitter hashtag: #blacklivesmatter. Even though the socially conscious slogan is formed by combining three words, as a hashtag it was converted into something linguistically innovative, attracting the attention of the assorted language scholars who gathered for the vote at the society's annual meeting in Portland, Oregon.
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We're excited to announce some significant improvements to our dictionary pages.
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Vocabulary.com News
Greetings from Portland, Oregon, where the American Dialect Society is holding its annual conference. On Thursday, in my capacity as chair of the society's New Words Committee, I presided over the nominating session for various categories in our Word of the Year selection.
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On the surface, and/or seems like a helpful but mostly harmless little phrase — a little ugly, perhaps, but still useful for those times when you want to be extra clear about what all the options are. Most people associate the phrase with legal writing, but it turns out that a surprising number of lawyers and judges hate it, claiming that it's actually unclear and thus impossible to interpret.
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Blog Excerpts
The Story Behind Stuart Scott's "Booyah!"
ESPN sportscaster Stuart Scott died of cancer over the weekend, and tributes to him have noted his ebullient use of slang, especially his signature word, "Booyah!" For Slate's Lexicon Valley blog, our own Ben Zimmer traces the origins of "Booyah!" back to a hip-hop imitation of gunfire. Read all about it here.
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