Here are some incredible old slang compliments and insults that are so hard to figure out, it’s funny. Like bawcock. That can’t be a compliment. Or can it? You’ll have to take this quiz to find out… If the quiz doesn’t display, please try opening in the Chrome browser.
The March 2017 update to Dictionary.com included over 300 new words and definitions, reflecting everything from news stories to fashion trends. We also updated several existing Dictionary.com entries. Once again, many new words came straight from the headlines, from Black Lives Matter and Burkini to alt-right and clicktivism. Some words like 420 and Kush reflect broader acceptance of marijuana use and culture, as it’s becoming …
Hipsters have become simultaneous objects of ridicule and desire, associated with the new and in vogue, and also with an absurd form of consumerism. Why do we call them hipsters, and how did this word, born of jazz music in the early 1930s, make the transition to describe young men in skinny pants and classes on how to properly sharpen a pencil?
Since 1990, the American Dialect Society has held a Word of the Year vote, which is open to the public. This year’s vote takes place on January 8, 2016 in Washington DC. Over the past few weeks, linguists have been discussing nominations for various categories, and the ADS website has a nice roundup of 2015 Word of the Year candidates. Dictionary.com announced our own Word of …
Charles Dickens is often given credit for inventing words that he was not the first to use. This is not surprising, if only because he was much more widely read than some of the people who had used these words before him. Dickens was also far more attuned to the language of the streets than were most of his contemporaries, and so his writing contains …
A motley combination of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Germanic dialects, the English language (more or less as we know it) coalesced between the 9th and 13th centuries. Since then, it has continued to import and borrow words and expressions from around the world, and the meanings have mutated. (Awesome and awful once meant nearly the same thing.) Some specimens in the English vocabulary have followed unusually …
There’s one phrase motivating social media users everywhere. Maybe you’ve heard of relationship goals, or workout goals, but what about “squad goals?” Here’s the rundown.
Many words have been wasted on the subject of when adulthood starts. Some hold that it comes about with the right to drink alcoholic beverages or vote in an election. For particularly stringent grammarians of a certain generation, the rite of passage that marks the official start of adulthood is the point at which one becomes annoyed at hearing someone say that something is awesome, …
While Kim Kardashian was busy “breaking the Internet” with her controversial photoshoot for Paper in November of 2014, New Zealand singer/songwriter Lorde was teaching the world—or at least her Twitter and Tumblr followers—about a new slang use of the word mom. How is mom used on the internet? These three little letters tweeted out by Lorde in response to Kardashian’s cover photo caused such confusion that the 18-year-old …
Over the last couple of years, the term bae has achieved widespread usage. While the noun form has been around for over 10 years, adjectival and verbal uses, along with other related forms, have more recently started popping up to describe the people and things we love, or at least like-like. Twitter, in particular, is rife with interesting new uses of the term. The popular social …