A Word A Day!

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Tuesday, 05 January 2016

Language Line

Just as we need to eat nutritious meals, get enough exercise and have sufficient sleep to have healthy bodies, we also need to constantly replenish our supply of new words in order to have enough of them to express ourselves well.

One new word a day is something all language learners should try to achieve. There are a number of online “word of the day” programmes that will conveniently deliver a word to your email inbox everyday.

These “word of the day” emails usually contain information about each day’s word; its pronunciation, meaning, and the etymology (its origins) as well as the usage of the word in an example sentence.

If you prefer not to use such a programme, you might like to consider picking a word each day from your daily newspaper and researching it yourself in an online dictionary or word-related website. Then, you can try to use that word a few times throughout the day.

An interesting tool to use to see the common usage of a word is to “Google” it. Google acts like a concordance – a software programme, where you insert a word and then it tells you what words are used before and after it as well as in what sense that word is used. Basically this gives you the modern context of the word and as English words often change their original meaning to fit modern life this is a very useful tool to have at your finger tips.

A word a day broadens our vocabulary and helps us express our thoughts and opinions more cohesively.