Archives
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You Didn’t Invent That: Charles Dickens and Boredom
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 …
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Why “Identity” Was Dictionary.com’s 2015 Word Of The Year
In 2015, Dictionary.com saw a number of themes emerge in the words that gained enough traction to be added to the dictionary along with words that trended in user lookups. The most prominent theme across both of these areas was in the expanding and increasingly fluid nature of conversations about gender and sexuality. Additionally, the theme of racial identity led to some of the most …
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Feels, Facepalm, And Fleek: What Words Did We Add To The Dictionary in 2015?
In our November 2015 update to the dictionary, we added more than 150 new words and definitions, and revised over 1,000 entries. New additions such as feels, yaaas, and doge highlight the role of social media in transmitting and popularizing new terms, while fitness tracker, digital wallet, and Internet of Things demonstrate the new ways that technological innovation is changing the way we live and …
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Lexical Investigations: Google
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 …
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Lexical Investigations: Goggle
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 …
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For All “Intents and Purposes” vs. “Intensive Purposes”
Both for all intents and purposes and for all intensive purposes are widely used to mean “for all practical purposes” or “virtually.” But which one is correct? The standard idiom is for all intents and purposes, not for all intensive purposes, though if you were to say these two forms out loud it might be hard to tell the difference between the two. For all …