Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from January, 2016
Dept. of Word Lists
Learn the Words Martin Luther King, Jr. Used to Change the World
Commemorate MLK Day with African-American history resources.
From vocabulary lists to lesson ideas, we've got a host of vocab-focused resources to make planning MLK Day and Black History Month easier to plan.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
"They" Won! Gender-Neutral Pronoun is 2015 Word of the Year
Gathering in Washington D.C. for its annual meeting, the American Dialect Society has made its 26th annual selection for Word of the Year. And as predicted in this space last month, the winner is a lowly pronoun: they used as a gender-neutral alternative to he and she, with special attention paid to its use as an expression of "non-binary" gender identity.
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Greetings from Washington, D.C., 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. Winners will be selected from the different categories on Friday evening, culminating in the vote for the overall Word of the Year. Here's the list of nominees.
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Language LoungeA Monthly Column for Word Lovers
The Pulse(s) of the Nation(s)
What's a "pulse"? Along with a heartbeat, it's also a formal term for beans.
The breathless anticipation is now at an end and the festivities can commence: it is 2016, the International Year of Pulses. If your main dialect of English is a North American one, you may begin by wondering whose pulses are included, since you probably think of pulse as designating the rhythmic contraction and expansion of the arteries with each beat of the heart. But there is the other pulse, familiar to speakers of other English dialects, that is more or less synonymous with legume.
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It's hard to believe another year has left the building, leaving us all closer to singing with the angels, talking a dirt nap, or insert your euphemism for death here. Like any other year, 2015 was full of new words and old words newly prominent. While many of these terms were stalwart members of the lexicon, others were sneaky, sketchy, and suspect: there were euphemisms aplenty.
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