Bond Ambition: “Squads” and “Squad Goals” Explained
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.
Tag Archives: slang
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What Does Calling Someone “Mom” On The Internet Mean?
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 …
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Here Are All The Ways to Use the Word Bae
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 …
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Vocabulary Unplugged: Technology and the Lexicon
Even the least tech-savvy lexicographer understands that technology is a robust source of new words. As technologies move from the realm of science fiction into our everyday realities, new words and meanings spring up around them. While it is expected that names for these new technologies and the words describing our interaction with them are regularly entering the language, there are less obvious coinages that …
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Head of the Class: A College Slang Cheat Sheet
To help kick off the new academic year, we asked college students who use Dictionary.com to share slang they’ve heard around campus. We received more than 2200 responses in only a few days. Notable themes we noticed include the supernatural, food, and making out. We’ve highlighted our favorite responses below. Are you familiar with the following terms? What other slang terms have you come across …
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Infographic: A College Slang Cheat Sheet
Download the infographic here
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Is Text Messaging Ruining English?
With every generation come cries that teenagers are destroying the language with their newfangled slang. The current grievance harps on the way casual language used in texts and instant messages inhibits kids from understanding how to write and speak “properly.” While amateur language lovers might think this argument makes sense, experts say this is not at all the case. In fact, linguists say teenagers, far …
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Lexical Investigations: Noble
When it comes to the word noble, the senses “royal” and “distinguished” are probably quite familiar, but there are many other uses of this word that might surprise you. Just as a noble person of virtue can resist manipulation, since the 14th century, stones and metals that resist corrosion are also said to be noble.
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Lexical Investigations: Hokey
The story of hokey shows how tangled the backstory of words can sometimes seem to be. Hokey first appeared after World War II as American slang for “overly sentimental” or “contrived. The term’s immediate predecessor seems to be hokum, a blunt American term for “nonsense,” coined earlier in the 20th century by combining hocus-pocus (or hokey-pokey) with bunkum, another word which also means “nonsense.”
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Lexical Investigations: Bomb
People have been dropping the word bomb in many different ways for years, and it’s easy to see why: because it’s such a short and evocative word, it’s perfect for slang. At times bomb has meant a large sum of money, a marijuana cigarette, a nice car, and an old beat up car.
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Lexical Investigations: Camouflage
Camouflage Before it was a military term, camouflage was French street-slang popular among pickpockets and other shadowy figures in 1870s Paris. A combination of the Italian word camuffare (to disguise) and the French word camouflet (puff of smoke), this word described a common practice among thieves:
