Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2016
Success Stories
Students Achieve "Unheard Of" Literacy Gains at Ohio's Woodward Park Middle School
Teachers were amazed at how Vocabulary.com helped disadvantaged students.
At Woodward Park Middle School in Columbus, Ohio, teachers were looking for a way to help out struggling students with literacy and turn around their scores on standardized tests. By adding Vocabulary.com as a literacy center in the language arts classroom, they saw immediate results.
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Announcements
March Madness Strikes the Vocabulary Bowl Leaderboard
Our monthly roundup of the top 20 schools features newcomers and familiar faces.
In the Vocabulary Bowl, we had our own kind of March Madness, with the best and the brightest jockeying for position at the top of the leaderboard. Our SportsCenter-style roundup catches you up on all the action.
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Tips & Tricks
Prep Your Students for Better Reading!
Make vocab activities out of any text in no time at all.
Teachers: here's how to use Vocabulary.com to prep your students for whatever text you are teaching. Watch this video and see how easy it is to quickly make adaptive learning activities using our list making tools.
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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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Success Stories
How Houston ISD Boosted Literacy District-Wide and Dominated the Vocabulary Bowl
District schools built a culture of word learning and got students in the competitive spirit.
The Houston Independent School District has made boosting literacy a district-wide goal, and to that end, it has rolled out Vocabulary.com to all middle school and high school students in the district. In the process, Houston ISD schools have dominated the nationwide Vocabulary Bowl.
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Vocabulary Bowl
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