Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from January, 2016
Dept. of Word Lists
Don't Believe the Hype: Vocabulary Still Matters on the SAT
The rationale behind our roadmap to the SAT.
While it's true that the new SAT will no longer directly assess students on their knowledge of "obscure" vocabulary via sentence completion questions, don't be fooled into thinking that students will encounter less vocabulary on the test. Words still matter, and a student's vocabulary knowledge will still remain a powerful predictor of his or her overall score on the new SAT Reading Test.
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Irony, satire, and sarcasm all fall into the category of, "That's funny but I'm not sure what my English teacher wants me to call it."
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Than compares things, but then is all about time. They sound similar and were even spelled the same until the 1700s. Not anymore! Vive la difference!
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Use definitely and definitively when there's no doubt, but save definitely for emphasis and definitively for the final say. If you definitely want to go to a party, but your mom definitively says no, then you aren't going. Quit asking.
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When change is a brewin', remember: to ferment is to cause a chemical change to food or drink, like turning grapes into wine, but to foment is to stir up trouble, like turning a group of people into an angry mob.
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Both make comparisons, but a metaphor compares one thing to another straight up, while a simile uses "like" or "as."
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Vocabulary Shout-Out
Oscar or No, What Does "Revenant" Mean?
Tracing the ghostly meaning of this word back into French.
Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant leads all films with 12 nominations for the 88th Academy Awards, and it has already racked up several Golden Globes. The movie has put the unusual word revenant on the tip of a lot of tongues, with many of us asking, "What the heck does it mean?"
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