A Word A Week: June 2012

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Episode #038, 24.06.2012: miscellaneous

Sound: /ˌmɪsəˈleɪnɪəs/

miscellaneous, adjective. Of mixed composition or character; (with plural noun) of various kinds; (of persons) many-sided.

In a sentence: “His pencil case has a set of miscellaneous pens.” “There are miscellaneous items in the bag.”

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Sunday, June 17, 2012

Episode #037, 17.06.2012: mean (all meanings)

Sound: /miːn/

I won’t give you the dictionary definitions for a change, because those are rather complicated. Also, you probably already know most meanings. What are the meanings?

to intend. As in: “I didn’t mean to do that.” “She meant well.” “The sugar was meant for the cake.” “He was meant (by providence) to do this job.”
to convey meaning. “What do you mean?” “Did she mean what she said?” “My home means a lot to me.” “What does this word mean?”
cruel, malicious, unkind. “He’s very mean. He tried to make me fall down.”
A method or course of action used to achieve some result (now chiefly in plural). “…the means to an end.” “By which means will you accomplish this task?”
financial resources. “He lives by his own means.”
average, medium. “5 is the mean of 2 and 8.” “A compromise is a mean between two parties.” “The mean sea level is half-way between those of high and low water.”
in the mean (intervening) time, while
inferior, poor, low in quality. “He is no mean scholar.”

Those are the most common usages. Check your dictionary and wiktionary.org for even more definitions.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Episode #036, 10.06.2012: Savvy?

Sound: /ˈsæv.i/

savvy. Corruption of Spanish sabe (knows). In slang use: Do you understand? (no savvy I do, he etc. does not know or understand); also as noun: understanding, wits, know-how.

In a sentence: “I'm Captain Jack Sparrow, savvy?”

Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean uses this one a few times. It simply means, “do you understand”, but it sounds a little bit cooler.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Episode #035, 03.06.2012: Spotlight: Google Ngram

Today we’ll talk about Google Ngram. You can find it here.

As you might know, Google scanned a lot of books, which you can search and preview with Google books (books.google.com). With Google Ngram, you can see how many times (in percent) a word was used in books of a certain year. With this tool, you can see how widely a word was used in a certain time period. For example, type in the word “war”. In the graph you can see two spikes; they are unsurprisingly at the two world wars. You can also type in “war, peace” and compare the two words. Go ahead and try; type in words that come to your mind. Try “dog, cat” or “pencil, pen” or maybe also words from this podcast. You will find interesting results. For example, the word “Google” was more present in books around 1900 than in 2000!

Send your most amazing insights to: awordaweek@hotmail.de