From twisted trinkets to haunted heirlooms, unleash your scariest cursed object story in Dictionary.com’s Haunting Hooks writing contest. The Contest We’re challenging you to write an original opening to a story about cursed objects using 50 words or less. Whether it’s eerie, chilling, or darkly funny, your first lines must pull the reader in right away. The Prizes Judge’s Choice: The winning entry will be …
The monsters have been summoned and winners have emerged. For Dictionary.com’s fourth annual spooky writing contest, we dared you to write an original opening to a terrifying monster story using 50 words or less. After nearly 900 bone-chilling submissions, our guest judges, Dan and Lynze Cummins from the Scared To Death podcast, have chosen the creepiest haunting hook of them all. She walked down the …
Monsters, mayhem, and madness—bring your best fright to Dictionary.com’s spooky writing contest, Haunting Hooks: Scary Monster edition! The Contest We’re challenging you to write an original opening to a scary monster story using 50 words or less. Whether it’s spooky, funny, or outright horrifying, your opening needs to hook the reader in just a few lines. The Prizes Judge’s Choice: The winning entry will be …
Monsters, mayhem, and madness—bring your best fright to Dictionary.com’s spooky writing contest, Haunting Hooks: Scary Monster edition! The Contest We’re challenging you to write an original opening to a scary monster story using 50 words or less. Whether it’s spooky, funny, or outright horrifying, your opening needs to hook the reader in just a few lines. The Prizes Judge’s Choice: The winning entry will be …
A new year means new opportunities. No, we don’t mean going to the gym with you for a week. It is a perfect time to learn cool new words! To that end, we provide great words every day through our Word of the Day. This daily offering is a fantastic way to learn some awesome new words. But how exactly do you learn new vocabulary? …
The English language is famously full of confusing and often contradictory spelling conventions. You know it’s bad when misspell itself is one of the most common misspellings! To identify the words that consistently give people trouble, we analyzed Dictionary.com search data to compile this list of the most commonly misspelled words. For each word, we prepared tips to help you remember how to spell it …
We all have those words that we’ve heard over and over but don’t have the chance to write out all that often. Which can lead to a little bit of confusion when you actually need said word—like handing in your job application with “resume” in big letters on top instead of résumé. Or worse, talking about your résumé and pronouncing it resume the entire time: …
By Lyndsey Gresehover You’ve completed the brainstorming and research. You have created an essay outline that serves as your roadmap (or “skeleton” as some call it) and have even finished the writing. However, there is still one more equally important step to ensure your paper has all the required elements … your writing checklist. Checklists are tools we use in lots of things we do. …
After nearly 5,000 (!) submissions, three finalists, more than 3,000 votes, and some seriously scary sci-fi: it’s official. You have chosen the winner of the 2022 Haunting Hooks Scary Story Opener Writing Contest! For our second annual edition of the contest, we again challenged contestants to write a captivating opening to a scary story in 50 words or less. This year, there was a theme: …
Mr. and Mrs.: What do they stand for? The contractions Mr. and Mrs. are short for Mister and Missus/Missis. These contractions, like their longer forms, are used in etiquette to show respect to men and women. Mr. and Mrs. are pronounced the same as their longer forms: Mr. is pronounced as [ mis-ter ] and Mrs. is pronounced as [ mis-iz ] or [ miz-iz …
From fire to the internet, science and technology have shaped and changed the world. But we can imagine so much more. Time travel! Teleportation! Interstellar spaceships! These (at least for the time being) are the realm of science fiction. In this article, we’ll discuss what elements contribute to a story being categorized as sci-fi and provide examples on page and on screen, including “hard sci-fi” …
