Sometimes, letting out a curse word feels pretty darn good, doesn’t it? How about letting out the word that means “feeling good about cursing?” It’s real, and it skyrocketed to the top of our trending words list for the week of April 6–13, 2018!LalocheziaSearches for lalochezia, which means “emotional relief gained by using indecent or vulgar language,” climbed a whopping 15,930%. The term has been …
One way to get to know a country is through its food. Another way is by using the country’s public transportation. Some unique modes of transportation are just for fun, like dog-sledding trips in Norway and zorbing in New Zealand (which involves rolling down a hill inside a giant inflatable ball, just saying). Other means of transportation are more practical . . . here’s a …
With the recent #MeToo and Times Up movements, equality and the empowerment of women have become household conversations around the world. Everyone from your next-door neighbor to your favorite high-school teacher has likely joined the discussion, using a brand-new set of vocabulary including the words misogyny and sexism. While these two terms may seem similar, there are actually several differences that make them stand on …
Social media was abuzz the week of March 31–April 5, 2018 with talk about—what else—Facebook, and all this talk put at least one word in the hot seat on Dictionary.com’s trending list!GlibGlib took an abrupt 868% climb when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the term to clap back at Apple CEO Tim Cook, who had criticized the social-media company’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. Meaning “readily fluent, …
Can you guess whether these words are celebrity baby names or past Dictionary.com words of the day? You’re intrigued, you know it . . . . and maybe learning these past Word of the Day picks will even inspire some naming creativity (wink, wink). If the quiz doesn’t display, please try opening in the Chrome browser.
Sentient. We define this word as “having the power of perception by the senses; conscious.” Fans of the Terminator movie series will know this word and its implications (Skynet, cough cough). And, we can’t forget the Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which desktop AI system is better at understanding language? But, in this article, we’re focusing on the sentient Google Home and Assistant and how …
It was the interview heard ’round the world, so what happened when Stormy Daniels showed up on 60 Minutes to talk about her alleged affair with President Donald Trump? Let’s just say searches on Dictionary.com heated up this week, March 24–30, 2018! Perched and affair Twitter was abuzz the evening of March 25 as Daniels described the way the president perched on a bed. Searches for …
Don’t mortify yourself by saying “fo’ shizzle” to someone from Chicago or by expecting Hi-Tek slang to be recognized outside of the Cincinnati metropolitan area. (No offense, Nati residents.) Rap slang can be as hyper-regional as sports alliances. With the help of M.I.M.’s lyrical breakdown about how each part of the US raps, we created an atlas of five notable words from each region. East …
How do I love thee? Let me count the schwas.Not exactly what Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in Sonnet 43, but we like it all the same. Why? Because it finally pays tribute to the most frequent vowel sound in English: the schwa. What is the schwa and how does it sound? Simply put, the schwa is a reduced, neutral vowel sound written as an upside-down …
Turpitude, venality, and demagogue When former CIA Director John Brennan weighed in on the firing of former Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe, he likely expected to make waves. But did he know he’d send searches for his word choices skyrocketing on Dictionary.com? The director’s tweet, issued in response to President Donald Trump, represents the biggest spike in searches on Dictionary.com March 16–23, 2018! …
We’ve created these Homework Help articles, organized by category and reviewed by our lexicographers, to help with any and all online schooling. Take a look! Dictionary.com recently launched a new type of content that appears on our definition pages for select terms that students mainly come across during homework assignments. So, fittingly, we’ve called these articles “Homework Help”! Below, we’ve categorized them by subject to …
1. What caused the biggest jump in searches on Dictionary.com the week of March 8–15, 2018? The word rehabilitation had a whole lot of people scratching their heads. The term took a 607% leap in searches over the prior week. The spike followed news out of Connecticut that a former University of Hartford student named Brianna Brochu had been sentenced by a judge to “accelerated …