Vocabulary.com Blog Contributor
Ben Zimmer
Ben Zimmer is language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and former language columnist for The Boston Globe and The New York Times Magazine. He has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. In addition to his regular "Word Routes" column here, he contributes to the group weblog Language Log. He is also the chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society.
Dept. of Word Lists
What Were the "Vocabulary Moments" of the First Democratic Debate?
Analyzing the candidates' rhetoric with Vocabulary.com's "word's-eye view."
Last night, the five Democratic candidates for president squared off in the first of their televised debates, moderated by CNN's Anderson Cooper. Frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her four challengers, Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley, Jim Webb, and Lincoln Chafee, stated their cases to primary voters, and their rhetoric was crystallized in the vocabulary items they used. But what were their significant "vocabulary moments"?
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
The Story of "Boondoggle": A Useful Word for Useless Work
From Boy Scout craft to symbol of "Roosevelt the Waster."
For the Slate podcast Lexicon Valley, I explored the peculiar origins of the word boondoggle, which took a strange trip from the world of Boy Scouts to the world of politics 80 years ago.
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Dept. of Word Lists
The Presidential (and Not So Presidential) Vocabulary of the Second GOP Debate
Vocabulary.com provides another "word's-eye view" of the candidates
At the second Republican presidential debate, held last night at the Reagan Presidential Library and aired on CNN, the candidates jockeyed for the attention of primary voters. There are many ways of judging their performances, but what better way than to analyze their choice of words?
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Dept. of Word Lists
Our Word's-Eye View of the First GOP Debate
Corpus-based analysis highlights the candidates' most relevant words
In a rapid-response survey of candidates' vocabulary in the first GOP debate, broadcast last night on Fox News, Vocabulary.com analyzed the transcript to identify each candidate's most relevant vocabulary word. And the data-driven approach yielded some interesting results about the candidates' language use.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
How Did We Get the "Heebie-Jeebies"?
The tale of a comic-strip race horse, Louis Armstrong, and a jittery dance.
For Slate's podcast Lexicon Valley, I look at the origins of an expression that turns nervousness and apprehension into a jokey malady: the heebie-jeebies. It turns out we can pin down not just the coiner but the very day that he coined the word.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
Is "Southpaw" from Boxing or Baseball?
The term for left-handers is steeped in 19th-century athletic lore.
With the boxing movie "Southpaw" opening, it's a good time to ponder where the term "southpaw" came from as an epithet for a left-hander. Baseball and boxing have both used the term for a long time to label lefty athletes, but which came first?
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
If It's "All Greek To You," Blame Monks And Shakespeare
The news coming out of Greece these days can be downright perplexing, leading many in the news media to recycle the old phrase, "It's all Greek to me." I talked to NPR's Weekend All Things Considered about the origin of the expression.
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