Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from April, 2016
Success Stories
Connecticut's Dodd Middle School Sees "Unbelievable Success" in Student Scores
School sees rapid progress on standardized tests and shoots up the Vocabulary Bowl leaderboard.
When Dodd Middle School in Cheshire, Connecticut wanted to raise scores on a test that judges students' reading comprehension, they turned to Vocabulary.com for help. Their subsequent success was, in the words of one language arts teacher, "unbelievable."
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
A Big Upset in the Competitive Crossword World
Six-time champ Dan Feyer finally met his match in Howard Barkin.
While college basketball fans may be marveling at the exciting upsets of March Madness, the world of competitive crossword solving has experienced a major upset as well, as six-time reigning champion Dan Feyer was dethroned in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, losing out to first-time champ Howard Barkin.
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Language LoungeA Monthly Column for Word Lovers
Fractious Compounds: How Should Dictionaries Treat Words Like "Heart-Shaped"?
Dictionaries often ignore seemingly straightforward compound words. But should they?
One of the ways in which massive corpora (databases of natural language examples) have revolutionized lexicography is by providing access to a level of statistical analysis of language that was never before possible. The data in a corpus can tell us, with the effort of a few keystrokes—and backed by the effort of hundreds of person-hours of software development—all we need to know about the most frequent uses and collocations of words.
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