Blog Excerpts - | Vocabulary.com

Impact. Ideate. Interface. Those are just 3 of 30 business buzzwords that you should remove from your vocabulary. See goodcopybadcopy for the whole list.

Topics: Vocabulary Business writing Blogs Words

Even the New York Times can get tripped up on the difference between gerunds and participles. In her Tip of the Week, Copyediting newsletter editor Wendalyn Nichols explains how a punctuation error in the Times is symptomatic of confusion about words ending in -ing.

Topics: Vocabulary Blogs Language Words Usage

The lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary are plumbing a new source for language use: Twitter. Hear how the OED is making use of ephemeral "tweets" from Editor at Large Jesse Sheidlower, on the public radio program Future Tense.

Topics: Vocabulary Dictionaries Online Words

Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters writes: "After years of weird-word collecting, I'm pretty unfazed by words with multiple, redundant, exuberant suffixes... However, even I was gobsmacked out of my chair when I spotted mystery-y-ish-y." Read all about the suffix-y pileups Mark has found on OUPblog .

Topics: Vocabulary Blogs Words

The New York Times has been keeping track of the words that users of the Times website click on the most to look up definitions. The word with the most lookups in 2009 is the Latin term sui generis. Nieman Journalism Lab presents the words and crunches the numbers.

Topics: Vocabulary Media Blogs Words

If you were baffled by Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle's use of the expression "going down a bomb," as discussed in this Word Routes column, then wonder no more. Lynne Murphy explains the idiom on her blog Separated by a Common Language. Lynne also makes sense of such Briticisms as "he looks a right twit" and "going down a treat."

Topics: Vocabulary Blogs Language Words

Why say "blizzard" when you could say "snow-mageddon"? And why refer to the "swine flu outbreak" when you could say "a-pork-alypse"? Visual Thesaurus contributor Mark Peters considers some catastrophic coinages in his latest column for Good.

Topics: Vocabulary Blogs Fun Words

Vocabulary.com Blog Blog Excerpts

Business Buzzwords to Avoid

When a Gerundy-Looking Word Isn't a Gerund

The OED is All a-Twitter

Mystery-y-ish-y!

Most Looked-Up Words in the Times

Going Down a Bomb

Wordgeddon!