Latest news with #MerriamWebster
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
40 People Who Were So Wrong But So Confident When They Posted Something On The Internet
person who didn't know where Spain was: person who attempted to sell their dryer: person who was proud of their flowers: person who tried to correct the Merriam-Webster dictionary: person who couldn't do elementary school math: Related: person who misunderstood some important geography: person who tried to make an argument that the earth is flat: person who misspelled a word and doubled down with an explanation: person who was trying to get to know someone: person who had a message for baristas: person who didn't understand what "theory" meant: person who didn't know how time worked: person who wanted people to remember their worth: Related: parent who needed to get back to school themself: person's answer to a Hinge prompt: person explaining a game: person who realized what "news" meant: person trying to find their son's glasses: person opening up about their insecurities: person who told someone what they were having for breakfast: Related: person who was trying to be sexy: person who didn't know what the sun was: person who didn't understand simple fractions: person who stan'ed Big Dairy: person who left a review about how fresh a restaurant's food was: person who shared their goal for graduating: person whose grammar rules made no sense: person's message about actors: person who corrected someone and still made a mistake: person's passionate rant about cats' diets: Related: person who just needed to sort out their stomach issues: person who found Washington very scenic: person who was protecting their food: person who thought someone misspelled a word: person who insisted that space was fake: person who planned to travel outside of the US based on the election outcome: person who said blood was blue: person who had a hot take about certain wings: person who was describing someone's boyfriend: finally, thisi person who gave financial advice: Want more funny, weird, wholesome, or just plain interesting internet content like what you just read? Subscribe to the Only Good Internet newsletter to get all of the scrolling with none of the doom. No politics, no celeb drama, just Good Content. Also in Internet Finds: Also in Internet Finds: Also in Internet Finds:
New York Times
a day ago
- General
- New York Times
Why Dictionaries Still Define Us
Have you ever obeyed the suggestions of a digital writing assistant to replace a word or restructure a sentence without knowing how, why or even if it made your writing better? Before the reign of digital tools, you'd probably have turned to a dictionary for the same assistance. Our parents and grandparents picked up a heavy book and looked up what words meant, how they're used, maybe glanced at their etymology — and then made a linguistic choice, however shaky or idiosyncratic, to express their ideas. In today's universe of spell-check, autocorrect and artificial intelligence — each of which is capable of making those choices for us — why should we keep producing and owning actual, cinder-block-sized dictionaries? Because dictionaries enable us to write not with fail-safe convenience but with originality and a point of view. While A.I. assistants manufacture phrases and statements so writers don't have to think them up, dictionaries provide us with the knowledge to use language ourselves in expressive and potentially infinite ways. They place choice — and authority — literally in human hands, forcing us to discover how we want to explain ourselves and our ideas to the world. Dictionaries aren't merely long lists of words and meanings; they're also instructions for how best to use those words. Since the debuts of Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, English dictionaries have reflected the language of particular populations — the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster don't quite say the same things. Simultaneously, by codifying the meanings, uses and connotations of words, those same dictionaries have shaped language. Lexicographers look to the public to determine words' meanings, and we in turn look to lexicographers to verify that our understanding of words is shared and mutually understood. The parameters of English are formed both top-down and bottom-up. Dictionaries amalgamate and standardize these two linguistic influences and, in doing so, define our most fundamental cultural medium. Standard English doesn't exist today the way it did as recently as the late 20th century. Thanks to the colloquial tone of ubiquitous internet-based communication, formal English has become essentially absent from most people's lives. Where my parents' letters to friends and colleagues would have adopted genial but brittle tones and structures, the vast majority of my social and professional correspondence is informal. Smartphone messaging conventions — like using exclamation points to indicate pleasant normalcy and ellipses to evoke impatience or indifference — routinely seep into follow-ups from artists and lawyers alike. It's almost as if the more informal one's writing is, the more capable, authoritative and trustworthy it reads. This acceptance of vernacular in contemporary mainstream English is new, but by no means uniform. English-speaking societies have always used an array of dialects, but until relatively recently, lexicographers arbitrarily viewed nonstandard Englishes as unsophisticated and therefore unworthy of regular inclusion in dictionaries. Today there is a general awareness that particular nations, for instance, speak not one but a group of different Englishes. Dictionaries are therefore no longer confronted with the task of defining a prestige dialect but rather with describing and legitimizing the contrasting ways people use words, a task for which they, unlike less deliberate digital alternatives, are well suited. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Today's Quordle Hints (and Answer) for Saturday, July 19, 2025
If you're looking for the Quordle answer for Saturday, July 19, 2025, read on—I'll share some clues, tips, and strategies, and finally the solution. Beware, there are spoilers below for July 19, Quordle #1272! Keep scrolling if you want some hints (and then the answer) to today's Quordle game. (If you play Wordle, Connections, and Strands, check out our hints for those games, too.) How to play Quordle Quordle lives on the Merriam-Webster website. A new puzzle goes live every day. If you've never played, it's a twist on The New York Times' daily Wordle game, in which you have a limited number of attempts to guess a five-letter mystery word. In Quordle, though, you're simultaneously solving four Wordle-style puzzles, and each of your guesses gets applied to the four puzzles simultaneously. Due to the increased difficulty, Quordle grants you nine guesses (12 if you play on 'Chill' mode, or eight if you play on 'Extreme'), rather than Wordle's six. To start, guess a five-letter word. The letters of the word in each of the four quadrants will turn green if they're correct, yellow if you have the right letter in the wrong place, or gray if the letter isn't in that secret word at all. Ready for the hints? Let's go! Can you give me a hint for today's Quordle? Upper left: Gets the worm. Upper right: TV-watching action. Lower left: Overdone. Lower right: Shopping marathon. Does today's Quordle have any double or repeated letters? Upper left: No. Upper right: Yes, a repeated consonant. Lower left: Yes, a repeated consonant. Lower right: Yes, a double vowel. What letters do today's Quordle words start with? Upper left: E Upper right: C Lower left: T Lower right: S What letters do today's Quordle words end with? Upper left: Y Upper right: K Lower left: E Lower right: E What is the solution to today's Quordle? Upper left: EARLY Upper right: CLICK Lower left: TRITE Lower right: SPREE How I solved today's Quordle SLATE is a good start, but MOUND gives me absolutely nothing. I guess nothing is still information, but it's not as encouraging as a bunch of colorful tiles. I'll try SPOKE for the bottom right. Getting closer. SPIRE? Nope. Has to be SPREE. I think the upper right is either FLICK or CLICK. Let's try FLICK. Oops. CLICK it is. The bottom left is probably WRITE. Dang, nope. It's TRITE, but that means I'm out of guesses. The last one was EARLY. The best starter words for Quordle What should you play for that first guess? We can look to Wordle for some general guidelines. The best starters tend to contain common letters, to increase the chances of getting yellow and green squares to guide your guessing. (And if you get all grays when guessing common letters, that's still excellent information to help you rule out possibilities.) There isn't a single 'best' starting word, but The New York Times's Wordle analysis bot has suggested starting with one of these: CRANE TRACE SLANT CRATE CARTE Meanwhile, an MIT analysis found that you'll eliminate the most possibilities in the first round by starting with one of these: SALET REAST TRACE CRATE SLATE Other good picks might be ARISE or ROUND. Words like ADIEU and AUDIO get more vowels in play, but you could argue that it's better to start with an emphasis on consonants, using a starter like RENTS or CLAMP. Choose your strategy, and see how it plays out. Solve the daily Crossword
Los Angeles Times
4 days ago
- General
- Los Angeles Times
A Word, Please: Singular vs. plural? That's the question
A friend emailed recently to ask about the grammar on a T-shirt that read: 'The only minority destroying the country are the billionaires.' His question: 'Am I wrong or is the grammar on her T-shirt wrong? I've looked it up and checked it online and can't find a definitive answer.' He didn't mention what the grammar issue was, but in my view, there could be only one: the word 'are,' a plural verb, instead of the singular verb 'is.' If 'minority' is a singular noun, then you can't use a plural verb with it. That would be the equivalent of saying 'The dog are in the house' or 'Maria are here.' Classic subject-verb agreement problem. But is it? Like my friend, whom I'll call Richard because that's his name, I looked it up. I must have given Richard good advice in years past, because he apparently is part of the small minority who knows you can find answers to tricky plural-vs.-singular questions in the dictionary. For example, look up the word 'ethics,' skim a few lines and you'll see the note 'often used in plural, but singular or plural in construction.' So, using Merriam's examples, you can say: 'Ethics is his chosen field of study,' or you can say, 'The ethics of reuse and upcycling were imbued in the creation of all the pieces.' 'Is' in the first example is singular. 'Were' in the second example is plural. Both are correct. And that's the kind of help you can often find in a dictionary. Often, not always. Merriam's entry for 'minority' doesn't have any helpful notes about whether it's singular or plural. I don't even see them give any examples in which 'minority' is the subject of a verb, so we can't draw a good inference from the dictionary's 'minority' entry. I looked in my other reference books, too, including the usage guide Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, which usually has the answers I'm looking for. But not this time. No entry for 'minority.' Checking the issue online, as Richard did, seems like a reasonable approach. You can get some good information that way. You can also get a bucket of nonsense. And you can't know which is which. Automatically generated AI Overview answers often prove AI isn't as 'I' as it thinks it is. I've seen it give a lot of stupid answers to all kinds of questions. Recently, it told me that a certain disease affects less than 1 in a million Americans, 'which is less than 1%.' Gee, thanks, Google. Searching for 'is it minority is or minority are' on the search engine, the first hit is their AI Overview, and the rest of the first page is filled with answers from message forums, where you can expect random users to be right almost as often as AI is. But I knew from experience that there could be another way to tackle this problem. I have, in the past, written about whether 'majority' takes a singular or plural verb. I found the answer not in a dictionary but in a usage guide, Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, which says: 'Majority is a singular noun in frequent use as one of those collectives that take either a singular or plural verb depending on the writer's notion of the majority as a unit or as a collection of individuals.' You can say 'the majority is unified on this issue' or 'the majority are fighting among themselves.' Depending on your meaning, either the singular or the plural interpretation can work. Can we apply that logic to the word 'minority' and treat it as a singular or plural as we see fit? In the absence of a more knowledgeable source, I'll make the call. Yes, we can. June Casagrande is the author of 'The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.' She can be reached at JuneTCN@
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Today's Quordle Hints (and Answer) for Thursday, July 17, 2025
If you're looking for the Quordle answer for Thursday, July 17, 2025, read on—I'll share some clues, tips, and strategies, and finally the solution. Beware, there are spoilers below for July 17, Quordle #1270! Keep scrolling if you want some hints (and then the answer) to today's Quordle game. (If you play Wordle, Connections, and Strands, check out our hints for those games, too.) How to play Quordle Quordle lives on the Merriam-Webster website. A new puzzle goes live every day. If you've never played, it's a twist on The New York Times' daily Wordle game, in which you have a limited number of attempts to guess a five-letter mystery word. In Quordle, though, you're simultaneously solving four Wordle-style puzzles, and each of your guesses gets applied to the four puzzles simultaneously. Due to the increased difficulty, Quordle grants you nine guesses (12 if you play on 'Chill' mode, or eight if you play on 'Extreme'), rather than Wordle's six. To start, guess a five-letter word. The letters of the word in each of the four quadrants will turn green if they're correct, yellow if you have the right letter in the wrong place, or gray if the letter isn't in that secret word at all. Ready for the hints? Let's go! Can you give me a hint for today's Quordle? Upper left: Salad green Upper right: Forbidden Lower left: What money grants Lower right: Not your biggest fan Does today's Quordle have any double or repeated letters? Upper left: Yes, a double consonant. Upper right: Yes, a double vowel. Lower left: No. Lower right: No. What letters do today's Quordle words start with? Upper left: C Upper right: T Lower left: P Lower right: H What letters do today's Quordle words end with? Upper left: S Upper right: O Lower left: R Lower right: R What is the solution to today's Quordle? Upper left: CRESS Upper right: TABOO Lower left: POWER Lower right: HATER How I solved today's Quordle Let's start with SLATE and MOUND. I'll start with the bottom left. I think the E has to go in fourth position based on where that O is. I'll try POWER. Wow, that was it. Let's try FRESH for the upper left. Close. It could be CRESS. Yep! I think the bottom right is HATER. Yep. The upper right might be TABOO. Wow, I flew through that one. The best starter words for Quordle What should you play for that first guess? We can look to Wordle for some general guidelines. The best starters tend to contain common letters, to increase the chances of getting yellow and green squares to guide your guessing. (And if you get all grays when guessing common letters, that's still excellent information to help you rule out possibilities.) There isn't a single 'best' starting word, but The New York Times's Wordle analysis bot has suggested starting with one of these: CRANE TRACE SLANT CRATE CARTE Meanwhile, an MIT analysis found that you'll eliminate the most possibilities in the first round by starting with one of these: SALET REAST TRACE CRATE SLATE Other good picks might be ARISE or ROUND. Words like ADIEU and AUDIO get more vowels in play, but you could argue that it's better to start with an emphasis on consonants, using a starter like RENTS or CLAMP. Choose your strategy, and see how it plays out. Solve the daily Crossword
