Whether you’re speaking, reading, or writing in English, you can’t get very far before you stumble on a word with Latin influence. Aside from the estimated 60 percent of English words that have roots in Latin, you can’t pull out a book, pull up a YouTube video, or switch on Netflix these days without hearing some Latin phrases in your favorite movies, songs, and novels. From …
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 …
Sometimes a dictionary is too heavy to carry around for some light reading and too daunting to listen to as an audiobook. For all your language needs from etymology to grammar to more creative ways to curse, check out our recommendations below for the best language podcasts. And, because this is an article about language podcasts, we can’t help but mention our newly-launched Dictionary.com Word …
The word meme, coined in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, goes way beyond social-media pixels. Meme captures the concept of “cultural transmission” of ideas in general, where customs and ideas spread from brain to brain. Which means memes have been around longer than Success Kid or Kermit sipping tea. Wildfire ideas have been around as long as humans have—in fact, discovering fire is …
Before he was Snoop Dogg, the West Coast rap icon went by his given name: Cordozar Calvin Broadus. He was named after his stepfather. His stage name was inspired by Snoopy though, a childhood nickname. His parents gave him the pet name because of the way he looked. She might be known as Iggy Azalea on stage, but this Australian-born rapper’s official name is Amethyst Amelia …
Batman lurks like a bat in the shadows. Spider-Man slings webs like a radioactive spider. Superman is a literal translation of Friedrich Nietszche’s term ubermensch. And Wonder Woman is … well, what does Wonder Woman’s name tell us about her? A lot, it turns out. When William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman in the early 1940s, he envisioned her not only as Diana, an Amazon …
The continued box office success of the Fast and the Furious franchise gives moviegoers and word-lovers something to cheer about. Beyond the stunning action sequences, though, audiences, including us, actually really enjoy the title itself. That probably has something to do with its alliteration, “a figure of speech in which a consonant sound at the beginning of a word is repeated” (in this case the sound of the letter …
