Update: March Madness voting for round one has ended! See the winners below, and go vote in round 2! Since 1908, March Madness has been used to refer to basketball. Most notably, it describes the NCAA tournament (and all of the surrounding hype) that takes place each year. But here at Dictionary.com, we’re looking to create a little March Madness of our own: we’re hosting …
Was the thought of identifying latitude and longitude on a map in geography class one of your high-key stressors? Well, you’re not the only anxiety-ridden test taker out there! The concept of measuring Earth by coordinates isn’t an overwhelmingly hard concept to grasp, but identifying the difference between these two words can be a little tough. Since they are both units of measurement that help …
By Lyndsey Gresehover As an English/Language Arts and Reading teacher and blogger for almost two decades, the word gap is a fretful phrase that I hear all too often in education. But the real question is … does it really exist? What is the word gap? This idea came from a study done in the 1990s by two psychologists, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, where …
Just like people assume family members are inherently similar because they are related, people assume the same things about words: if they have similar spellings and soundings, they must be alike. As it is with people, the similarities between some related words that look and sound the same end there. Take ambiguous and ambivalent for example. They share the Latin prefix ambi-, which means “both,” …
No one truly needs a watch these days. We all have clocks in our pockets—our smartphones. Another benefit of this technology? The clock on our smartphone automatically changes when we enter a new time zone. Amazing! But, even though we don’t need to pay as much attention to time zones these days, that doesn’t mean they don’t still impact our lives. Let’s synchronize our watches …
Sometimes we’re at a loss for words, not because we’re speechless, but because no English term lends itself to the situation (or snack) at hand. At those times, we turn to other languages, celebrating them for the concepts we wish we could express so easily in English. Here are some of our favorite words from the Portuguese language. saudade This untranslatable Portuguese term refers to …