Dictionary Week celebrations continue with Word Love Day and a swoon-worthy smorgasbord of happenings, activities, and resources for language enthusiasts of every level. Calling all lexeme lovers, word nerds, and dictionary devotees! If you’re a bona fide language buff, this is the day for you! 🎁 We’re Giving Away Words We know you love words just as much as we do, so we’ve prepared a …
Dictionary Week continues with Word Pain Day, an occasion to recognize that, despite all its beauty and wonder, navigating the English language can be filled with angst and uncertainty. It’s a day for anyone who’s ever been done wrong by the pitfalls of grammar, spelling, and pronunciation (which, let’s be honest, is all of us). Never fear—we’ve got a whole lineup of activities, events, and …
Dictionary Week continues with Word Curiosity Day, an exploration of all the questions and wonder that words awaken in us. We’re here to answer all your burning questions about words, the dictionary, and the ever-evolving linguistic landscape. Feed and fuel your Word Curiosity with our expert panel, quizzes, and more! 🙋 Ask Us Anything! Now’s your chance to pose your most burning word questions directly …
Dictionary Week culminated with Word Inspiration Day. What inspires us is you—and all the ways you use Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com to express yourselves. Here at “D-com,” as we call it, we have a tradition in which new team members share the words that best tell us who they are. We extended that tradition to you—but with a twist. We asked you to tell us: What one word would you want …
Building a dictionary is the work of lexicographers, the people who write and edit dictionary entries. Samuel Johnson, for example, published A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755 and is often heralded as the father of English lexicography. As you might guess, however, the work of building and maintaining a dictionary requires large teams of dedicated individuals who are passionate about language—and many of …
When you look up words on Dictionary.com, you’ll encounter all kinds of labels on terms and their definitions. Taken in combination with the definitions, these labels are intended to help you understand how words are used. Some labels, like noun and verb, are straightforward, but the meanings of others, such as Disparaging, Archaic, and Literary, may be much less obvious. To help clarify and demystify …
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 …
The words breath and breathe are only one letter apart and have very similar meanings, so it can be easy to get them confused. In this article, we will define the words breath and breathe, explain how they are used differently, identify some words with a similar pattern, and provide examples that show how we typically use breath and breathe in sentences. The word breath …
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. …
We tried to think of a pun about dictionaries for this introduction, but thinking so hard gave us a headache—it’s thesaurus our head has ever been! Welcome to the Dictionary.com Pun Hall of Fame. Home of good puns, bad puns, funny puns, and the most groan-inducing puns in all the land. If you’ve got a pun-believable pun, share it with us, and you, too, might …
They say crime doesn’t pay, but people who commit extortion and blackmail would probably disagree. Are these criminals committing the same crime, or will they face different charges? In this article, we will define the words extortion and blackmail, break down the difference between them, and give examples of how they might be applied to different criminal scenarios. What is the difference between extortion and …
