Daily Vocabulary Activities

Barbara J. Feldman

It used to be that only the newspaper was daily, but now you can get a daily serving of vocabulary-building word activities on the Web, in your e-mailbox, or even on your pager or cell phone. Today's sites feature a new word, idiom, word game or quotation every day.

Cobuild Idiom of the Day

3 stars

An idiom is an expression whose meaning can not be understood from the meaning of the individual words. Today's entry was "to the marrow -- If you say that you are chilled to the marrow or frozen to the marrow, you are emphasizing that you are very cold." It can also be used to emphasize the intensity of someone's beliefs, such as "communist to the marrow." The black triangles (from none to three) indicate how commonly an idiom is used.

The Mavens' Word of the Day

5 stars

Random House's Mavens tackle the etymology (history and origins) of words and idioms in this daily column for high-schoolers and adults. On the question of whether "Wassup?" is a word or a contraction, Maven Enid responds "There's a better label for this kind of word, and this one gives us some insight into how a term like this comes to exist. We call it a "pronunciation spelling," which is a put-together spelling intended to express normal, casual, continuous, rapid speech. Some of these spellings, like "gonna," "gotta," and "lemme," have become frequent enough and conventionalized enough to have found a place in dictionaries."

Quotes of the Day

4 stars

Quotes of the Day provides four daily quotations from an eclectic collection both contemporary (Steven Wright: "There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.") and historic (Tolstoy: "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.") This daily dose is but one part of a large quotations site with a search engine. You can also access random quotes from a variety of collections such as Dave Barry ("Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth *and* fresher breath.") or Twentieth Century Quotations (Albert Schweitzer: "Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.")

Word Game of the Day

5 stars

Got two minutes? These daily puzzles for high-schoolers and adults come in five formats, playing with definitions, synonyms, antonyms, word ladder transformations, slang, even some history and geography. The games require a Java-enabled browser and are based on reference material from Merriam-Webster. Some are a little slow to load, but the game play is very quick and very addictive. Visit the two-month archive at the bottom of the page to play previous games.