Posts Tagged ‘vocabulary’
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on January 30, 2012
Madonna’s recent moonlighting stint as a dictionaries marketing executive is still paying dividends: another thousand people have looked up reductive since we discussed it last Monday, and it’s been the single most looked up word for the last two weeks. If you remember, Madge had said of a Lady Gaga song: “When I heard it [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on January 23, 2012
In 2011, there were 252 searches for the word reductive in the Macmillan Dictionary. So in the 7 days from 13th to 19th January inclusive, we would have expected to see 5. In fact, we had well over 2,000 individual searches for the word reductive. The reason, it would appear, was a comment made by [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on January 18, 2012
The Macmillan Dictionary got a mention in The Guardian yesterday, when Jane Martinson pondered the use of the word simper. A fellow journalist (male) had tweeted about a lawyer (female) ‘simpering’ at a witness (male) in the ongoing Leveson Inquiry. (The inquiry was set up in the wake of revelations that News International journalists had [...]
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Posted by Paul Emmerson on May 24, 2011
Memory game: progressive deletion on board Background ‘Key phrases’ are everywhere in Business English – they are a large part of the language input for communication skills. They need practising, and this is one of many posts to help do that. Activity 1 Write up on the board a series of numbered key phrases from [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on March 14, 2011
Following on from Andrew Delahunty’s great blog post last week, I notice that there is also a crossover of sporting terms into the more ordinary world of work. To take just one example, the national sport of football – there are many phrases commonly used there that we tend to use in the office. Here are some example [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on March 08, 2011
Just been reading this great article about how journalists, especially sporting journalists tend to use the phrase ahead of, where the word before would suit better. This month, What’s your English? concentrates on sporting English, and sporting people have many fascinating and entertaining ways to describe and discuss their great passion. There is a definite culture [...]
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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 February 10, 2011
OK, not literally. I would hate to think that my little blog was responsible for an increase in petty violence around the world! I am referring to the entertaining and useful site Google Fight. The site was originally created as a fun way to find out which names, phrases or things are most popular on [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on February 08, 2011
It would seem that many of you are involved in some sort of legal wrangle at present. The word hitherto has recently been searched for rather a lot in Macmillan Dictionary and this is a classic legal term – hence my suspicion! I like this word and think that rather than it being unusual and nebulous, it is well-suited to [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on February 03, 2011
Ah…rest, we could all do with a bit more of it and yet it can be such a rare commodity in our busy modern lives. The title of this article lists three words starting with rest…but beware! – one of these words has a quite different meaning. Restful, a lovely word describing something that helps you to chill out. When you reach [...]
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