Compliment and complement are commonly confused terms because they’re pronounced alike and originally shared some meanings. But over time, they’ve become separate words with entirely different definitions. What does complement mean? Complement with an E is the older of the two terms. Its noun sense has been around in English since the 1300s. The term derives from the Latin complēmentum, meaning “something that completes.” So, that means if …
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, …
From Final Jeopardy to toothbrushes made from panda’s favorite snack, the trending words on Dictionary.com took us all around the world and back again during the week of July 20–27, 2018. Get ready, get set, go word-crazy! Outercourse An attempt by Brock Turner’s lawyer to have his sexual assault conviction overturned—based on a claim that Turner only intended to have outercourse with his victim—sent hundreds …
The terms element and compound are commonly used in chemistry. If you need a simple explanation of what these terms mean, we have your solution. In this article, we will define the terms element and compound and explain how they are used differently in chemistry. element vs. compound An element is a substance that cannot be separated into simpler substances by chemical means. An element …
Depending on where you live, Christmas comes at a time of year that is cold, dark, and not very pleasant. What makes it all bearable, though, is that you can get together with friends and family to share meals, exchange gifts, and just hang out. But, what happens when the conversation starts to run dry? Don’t fret, we put together a list of some of …
Food, food, glorious food made its presence known in a big way on this Thanksgiving week edition of the Dictionary.com Trending Words list. From a rarely used plural for beef to a beef over the proper way to describe cheesecake, here’s what had you searching November 16–23, 2018! Cheesecake If there’s one thing Americans love, it’s food. We have a whole holiday centered around consuming …
From families being separated at the border, to a prominent Republican jumping ship from his party, to Beyonce and Jay-Z dropping new music, take a look at how the news affected searches on Dictionary.com the week of June 15–22, 2018. Concentration camp, illegal alien, cage, la familia, tender age Debates over the separation of children from their parents at the US border have dominated headlines …
You may have noticed a nifty new tool scrolling across the top of the homepage of Dictionary.com. But, what makes it tick? What is the trending word ticker, and how does it work? Rather than reading out stock prices, our ticker pulls real-time data on daily word search trends in our dictionary. The percentage is a measurement of how many searches there are for a …
The royal wedding taught the world a few new words, but it wasn’t the only thing driving our trending searches the week of May 18–25, 2018. Fascinator, pomp and circumstance, and ginge The royal wedding didn’t just bring Prince Harry and Meghan Markle together in holy matrimony. It offered up a vocabulary lesson or two! Searches for the fancy hats traditionally worn to royal shindigs—fascinators–climbed …
pandemic: life upended, language transformed 2020 has been, well, a lot. At Dictionary.com, the task of choosing a single word to sum up 2020—a year roiled by a public health crisis, an economic downturn, racial injustice, climate disaster, political division, and rampant disinformation—was a challenging and humbling one. But at the same time, our choice was overwhelmingly clear. From our perspective as documenters of the …
