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  1. Behind the Dictionary

     Slang's Staying Power
    Mon Sep 11 00:00:00 EDT 2006

    You know what "booze" means, of course, but what if you asked someone in London for a definition -- say, 500 years ago? Lexicographer Jonathon Green will tell you the word is a lot older than you might think. He's spent the last quarter century studying slang, and its history, in the English language. The respected editor of the authoritative Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon's written over a dozen books on the subject and has collected a database of over 100,000 slang words. He's now working on a mammoth multi-volume dictionary, due out in 2008, that will cover a half a millennium's worth of words, phrases and figures of speech -- salty and otherwise -- that have seeped into English as slang. We talked to Jonathon about his passion:

  2. Word Routes

     The VT Helps Out A Literary Bee
    Tue Nov 04 00:00:00 EST 2008
    Last night, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses held its fifth annual Spelling Bee in support of its non-profit efforts to help out independent literary publishers. The CLMP always attracts an all-star cast of spellers from the New York book world. This time around, the Visual Thesaurus joined forces with the CLMP Bee, supplying the words to stump the cream of the literary crop.

  3. Lesson Plans

     Online Homework Help: An Ethical Dilemma
    Mon May 25 00:00:00 EDT 2009
    How can VocabGrabber help students prepare to analyze a New York Times article on the ethical implications of commercial sites that assist students with their homework assignments?

  4. Behind the Dictionary

     The Hidden Lives of Words
    Wed Nov 14 00:00:00 EST 2007
    Wordsmith.org is something of an institution on the Internet, an online community started by computer-engineer-turned-linguist Anu Garg back in 1994 that now reaches more than 600,000 subscribers in 200 countries with its daily A.Word.A.Day newsletter. This email is more than just a new word every day: Anu also adds a daily, delicious quote from his extensive literary readings to inspire, challenge -- and surprise -- us. The Visual Thesaurus is proud to sponsor A.Word.A.Day and delighted to speak with Anu about his own, latest, book, on "the hidden lives and strange origins of words" entitled, The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two. Our conversation:

  5. Dog Eared

     Write View
    Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 EDT 2017
    These eight essays are a perfect way into learning about how a writer who started at the lowest rung at Time magazine in the 1950s developed to become the author associated with a body of nonfiction that is unparalleled in modern American letters for its breadth and depth.

  6. Word Routes

     Buzzword Watch: "Culturomics" and "Ngram"
    Thu Dec 23 00:00:00 EST 2010
    Last week, an exciting new tool for analyzing the history of language and culture was unveiled by Google. They call it the "Ngram Viewer," and it's an interface to study the enormous corpus of historical texts scanned by Google Books. The Ngram Viewer was rolled out in conjunction with a paper in the journal Science introducing the field of "culturomics." Dennis Baron has weighed in on the significance of this development for researchers. But what about those peculiar words, culturomics and ngram?

  7. Word Routes

     A Story of "Grog" That Won't Leave You Groggy
    Mon Dec 15 00:00:00 EST 2014
    For my latest appearance on the Slate podcast Lexicon Valley, I take a look at a word with an origin story that seems too good to be true: grog, an alcoholic concoction, typically of rum and water, that has been making sailors groggy since the 18th century.

  8. Candlepower

     "Common Sense" and Sensibility
    Tue Apr 19 00:00:00 EDT 2016
    Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice-presidential candidate, briefly made headlines last month when it was announced that she'd signed a production deal for a TV "reality" show set in a courtroom. "She'll preside over the courtroom of common sense," according to Larry Lyttle, the man behind the deal. If the show materializes, it won't be the first time a politician has claimed "common sense" as a preeminent virtue.

  9. Behind the Dictionary

     The Language of Science Fiction
    Wed Nov 07 00:00:00 EST 2007
    Words like "spacesuit," "blast off" and "robot" weren't born in science -- but in science fiction. To learn more, we called Jeff Prucher, the editor of Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, a rich and fascinating compendium of words invented and popularized by the genre. We spoke to him about science fiction's impact on English:

  10. Language Lounge

     That Only Happens in the Movies
    Mon Mar 04 00:00:00 EST 2019
    Linguistics and Big Data have been a fruitful partnership since they first found each other, and new hookups with promising results are happening all the time. Here's a small sampling of the riches to be found in two new corpora — the TV Corpus and the Movie Corpus.
117 118 119 120 121 Displaying 1181-1190 of 3460 Results