Dry Ink by Samantha O. from Miller Place, NYThe sun is setting. The sailboats are in clusters far out past the buoys. The beach is a picture already painted. A photograph already developed. And though I can feel the sand underneath my feet and the salt on my lips, It has already been. Wind has already brushed through my hair, The end of the …
Many American English speakers know that people say pop in Chicago, soda in Philadelphia, and coke in New Orleans, and that they all refer to a carbonated, flavored, and sweetened soft drink. But most of us don’t know that a blue norther is a cold wind in Texas or a pogonip is a dense, icy fog in Nevada. Where would one even look up obscure …
Gaming terms can be as foreign to non-gamers as technical jargon and quantum mechanics, but a closer look at the gamer’s glossary reveals many of the words to be intuitive extensions of words and concepts familiar to the non-gamer. Here are some gaming terms defined and explained for the gamer in all of us. Roguelike Roguelike refers to a type of video game that tends …
To modern ears, the following excerpt from Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, published in 1869, sounds risqué. Trollope writes: It is not pleasant to make love in the presence of a third person, even when that love is all fair and above board; but it is quite impracticable to do so to a married lady, when that married lady’s sister is present. As …
Graphologists, or self-proclaimed handwriting experts, claim that it does. Specifically they claim that individuals who share certain personality traits write in a similar fashion, so graphologists analyze handwriting to deduce the character traits of the writer. In the early 1900s, Milton Newman Bunker invented the most common graphology technique called graphoanalysis. (Other methods of graphology predate Bunker’s work.) His approach relies on the stroke shape …
oops, misspelling
To explore the psyche of a people, do not look at what they do–look at what they do wrong. Today, we introduce the Misspelling of the Year. A word that was looked up significantly more this year than the year before. A word with lots of different misspellings. A word in the news. The word: furlough. In 2013, Dictionary.com saw tens of thousands of lookups …
From PRISM and the Edward Snowden scandal to the arrival of Google Glass, 2013 was the year that the desire to be seen and heard was turned on its head. Consider the following: In January, the TSA scrapped airport body scanners that produce near-naked images of travelers; In June, Edward Snowden revealed the widespread global-spying program, Project PRISM; In October, Google announced new privacy policy …
2013 was an exciting year for the English vocabulary. Some long-simmering terms like twerk bounced into the spotlight, while new coinages (from the trendy cronut and selfie to the serious Obamacare) cemented their place in the English language. As the English language grows and evolves, so must our dictionary. Here are just a few words recently added to Dictionary.com: Google Glass DWT bitcoin binge-watch confusticate …
Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, and Samwise Gamgee—we all know J.R.R. Tolkien created these beloved hobbits for his Hobbit (1937) and Lord of the Rings (1954–55) books. Hobbits are an imaginary race similar to humans, but they are short and have hairy feet. But, while Tolkien conjured up these memorable creatures, did he also the invent word hobbit? Where did hobbit come from? As you may have …
The term mansplaining received the high honor of being nominated as one of the “most creative” new words at the American Dialect Society 2012 Word of the Year vote. In addition to being creative, this term, particularly the -splaining part, has proven to be incredibly robust and useful as a combining form. What does -splain mean? In 2013, the lexicography team at Dictionary.com added definitions …
As flashy and fun as the terms selfie and binge-watch are, it’s important to keep in mind another, more business-casual buzzword of the 2010s: lean in. In fact, this term existed before Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg started using lean in to encourage women to embrace challenge and risk in the workplace. What is the traditional meaning of lean in? Traditionally lean in has been used in the …
The word twerk bounced its way into the universal consciousness of English speakers thanks to the controversial performance of Miley Cyrus at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards. Only a few days later, Oxford Dictionaries Online announced its quarterly update, listing twerk among the new additions (additions that had been planned months before “Twerkgate”). This led to public outcry against making this term “official.” As lexicographers …
