Archive for June, 2012
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Posted by Liz Potter on June 29, 2012
This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit a [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on June 28, 2012
Anybody can add a word and its definition to the Open Dictionary. Every week I choose a word from recent entries to rattle on about. Petaflop is this week’s word. petaflop (noun) a measure of a computer’s processing speed. It can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second Its speed? A [...]
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Posted by Liz Potter on June 28, 2012
In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s tip is about confusion between their and there. Don’t confuse their (the possessive form of ‘they’) and [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on June 26, 2012
In his book The Growth and Structure of the English Language, Otto Jespersen said the language was “like an English park, which is laid out seemingly without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper enforcing rigorous regulations.” For [...]
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Posted by John Williams on June 25, 2012
John Williams, our new guest blogger, worked as a lexicographer for COBUILD and later for Macmillan. He is currently a lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Portsmouth and is particularly interested in lexicography and language study as cultural and social practices. _____________ Last month I participated in a conference at the [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on June 23, 2012
If it wasn’t for the British mathematician Alan Turing, who was born 100 years ago today, you probably wouldn’t be reading the Macmillan blog – or any other blog for that matter. Without Turing’s visionary thinking, computers may not have developed as far as they have. A website dedicated to his work describes Turing as [...]
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Posted by Liz Potter on June 22, 2012
This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit a [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on June 21, 2012
baby box (noun) a box where where people can leave unwanted babies, who are then cared for by the authorities The United Nations is increasingly concerned at the spread in Europe of “baby boxes” where infants can be secretly abandoned by parents, warning that the practice “contravenes the right of the child to be known [...]
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Posted by Liz Potter on June 21, 2012
In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s tip is about the patterns that can follow the verb think. The verb think is rarely used [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on June 20, 2012
Among the first words that learners of a new language acquire are the words for hot and cold. The concepts are so basic to human experience that we don’t get through a day without many references to them. Hot, cold, and the basic words that are semantically connected with them (such as heat, cool, thaw, [...]
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