The truth is no one really knows when the great bard was born, but Shakespeare's fans celebrate his life and work on April 23rd (ironically, the date of his death). Join us in paying homage to Shakespeare this week by using the Visual Thesaurus to get to the heart of some of his more famous puns.  Continue reading...

Teachers, have you heard of jeggings? Well, if you haven't, surely your students have. Jeggings are skin-tight stretchy jeans, and their name was formed by fusing the words jeans and leggings. Jeggings and other popular words these days, like chillaxing and bromance, are all considered blends or portmanteau words — and worth exploring as a part of your students' word study.  Continue reading...

If you see a word that begins with the three letters m-a-l, do you get an uneasy feeling? Well, if you don't, maybe you should. This week's worksheet asks students to explore four common words beginning with the Latin prefix mal on the Visual Thesaurus and discover what all of their meanings have in common. Click here to find the worksheet, and here to read the related lesson plan, “Rooting One’s Way to Meaning.”

Once upon a time, in a suburban St. Louis County high school almost thirty years ago, there studied a girl who couldn’t seem to write an essay to save her life. She watched the papers come back. AP European History—D-. AP English—C. But owing to smaller class sizes and tenacious teachers who bled all over her paper with red ink, this girl began to see her mistakes. She tightened. She tweaked. She revised. She edited.  Continue reading...

Have you ever tried to figure out a word in another language because you recognized part of the word from your home language, and then you found out you were on the wrong track? Sounds like you might have been caught in a false cognate trap, the subject of this week's worksheet.  Continue reading...

Our latest Wordshop feature comes to us from Steven Kushner, who teaches at Bremen High School in Midlothian, Illinois. Steven drew on inspiration from family road trips to come up with a Mad Libs-style memory recall activity for the classroom.  Continue reading...