Posts Tagged ‘Macmillan Dictionary’
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on October 10, 2011
In the month leading up to 9th, October there was a 500% increase in the number of people looking up the word recycle. We sometimes get spikes in look-ups, and the causes can be varied. Sometimes, people are responding to items in the news and are looking up key words from a news story. On [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on October 03, 2011
One of the most looked up words in the last week is muppet. Our dictionary entry says it’s an insulting word for someone who behaves in a stupid way, but it’s only very mildly insulting, and is usually said in a friendly way. I couldn’t think of any reason why the term should suddenly become [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on September 26, 2011
Last week, we had twice as many visits from South Korea as we had the week before. The reason is probably that everyone was too busy celebrating Chuseok, a festival that is sometimes associated with the Harvest Moon. This year, Chuseok fell on 12 September. A harvest moon is the full moon that comes nearest [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on September 19, 2011
Thursday was a big day for the USA and Russia. The event probably went unnoticed by most of the population in both countries, but in New Zealand, the USA took on Russia in a group match of the Rugby World Cup. Meanwhile, on macmillandictionary.com, ten times more people looked up the word bear than the [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on September 05, 2011
Another month has gone by, and what have been the most searched for words on Macmillan English Dictionary in August? Near the top of the list is the word entrepreneur. Over half the searches for this word came from Brazil, a BRIC country. One of the key features of the BRICs is rapid economic growth, [...]
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Posted by Finn Kirkland on August 15, 2011
Our brief dip into local searches now focuses on Russia – and moves into the realms of idiom, phrasal verbs, and set expressions. Idioms are always a popular choice with language learners, with students often wanting to draw direct comparisons between the English expressions and phrases in their own language. The top search term over [...]
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Posted by Finn Kirkland on August 08, 2011
So, moving on from Germany to India this week. I took a look at the top 5 most sought-after words from India in the last week, and was mildly surprised to see that a couple of them were, in fact, Indian English. The word prepone is not commonly used in English outside India, but I [...]
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Posted by Finn Kirkland on August 01, 2011
I thought it might be interesting to give this post a more local flavour over the next few weeks, and explore which words are causing grief at a local level. So let’s kick off with Germany. Thanks to our partnership with the giant bilingual dictionary Leo, a lot of users come through to us for [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on March 01, 2011
This week, many of you have been searching the Macmillan Dictionary for the word acquaintance. I’m not sure how successful you will have been initially, because this word was often typed in without the first ‘c’. I can see how easy it is to make this mistake. In English, the letters ‘qu’ make the phonetic sound [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on January 25, 2011
In this post (my second on ‘words on your mind’), I see that you have all been out having a great time without me again. You gave yourselves away by so many of you searching for the term fun-filled in Macmillan Dictionary recently. Fun-filled is a lovely compound adjective used to describe something that is [...]
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