by Rachel Bradley Ah, childhood, those halcyon days when you chewed on a stuffed Mr. Snuffleupagus and cruised the driveway in your foot-pedaled convertible. Childhood was also the time when, hopefully, you learned how to peepee—with your wee wee, weenie, peenie, winkey, giney, or jay-jay. Ring any bells? Those goofy names remind us that childhood is also when our private parts are often given cutesy …
Kids are like sponges. They soak in the words they hear and see around them, and slowly their vocabularies build. But, sometimes, the words kids see and hear are not exactly PG.
Parenting has changed over the years and so has the language. While some phrases were popular years ago, today they are obsolete - and for good reason. Here are ten old expressions that your parents might have used but you wouldn't dare use today.
The Cinderella that English speakers know and love can be traced to the French story Cendrillon, first published in 1697 by Charles Perrault, though Chinese and Greek versions of this classic tale go back to the 9th century CE and 6th century BCE, respectively. Today, there are over 500 variants of Cinderella in Europe alone. It’s no surprise, then, that describing something as a Cinderella …
When you’re born, the first words you speak are so often mommy or daddy. (In some garbled, gurgled form or another—translation is often required.) So, let’s explore this commonality that connects us all and learn the different words people have come up with to describe their moms, dads, and grandparents. We might just toss in the random uncle, aunt, and cousin, too. Most of these …
Here are some generations past and present with their defining characteristics. They're all different and all rather interesting. So, buckle up, it's time to take a journey through history.
Just about every family has a word that makes sense only to them. Said by children, weird uncles, or parents in the heat of the moment, these words were coined when someone goofed … and yet somehow for these families they stuck. There’s even an official term for this phenomenon: malapropism, a noun that means “an act or habit of misusing words ridiculously, especially by …
Want your child to stand out on the preschool roster? Going with a strong noun name is an all-American tradition. Below are some names that you may not have even realized were nouns. And, with a little help from Babylist (who we love because they named the dictionary and thesaurus as some of the top ways to pick a baby name), we’ve ranked awesome noun-inspired names …
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 …
Negative reinforcement vs. positive reinforcement Most people think that positive reinforcement means to lavish praise or encouragement, and that is a good part of its essence, but not all of it. What is negative reinforcement, then? Is that about withholding praise? Scolding? Admonishing? Positive reinforcement is actually something we’re all pretty familiar with. When you were a kid, did you get a weekly allowance for …
