Keep Learning Your Native Language

In our efforts to learn foreign languages and expand our vocabularies in these, we often overlook the richness and beauty of our own native tongues. We’re often too busy flipping through flashcards, compiling word lists or jotting down new words in notebooks to realise that there’s still a lot to learn in our own language. English has such a wide vocabulary, derived from countless sources, and there are thousands of words which are rarely, if ever, used in everyday life. I was reading Umberto Eco’s Foucalt’s Pendulum quite recently and was amazed by the number of words he used which had me running for the dictionary. Reading certainly is a learning experience…

I get a certain pleasure from discovering new words and figuring out their etymologies, even if they are words I’d never get to use in everyday life or even on this blog. I’ve bookmarked a few sites that are perfect for learning new words (see below). These are all for learning English words but I’ll try and post links to ‘words of the day’ for other languages in the coming weeks.

• A Word a Day – This site posts new words based on a weekly theme, such as ‘unusual conjunctions’ and ‘words borrowed from Irish’.
• Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day – No weekly theme here but it does give example sentences as well as interesting facts about the day’s word.
• Dictionary.Com Word of the Day - This gives plenty of example sentences as well as a brief etymology of the word in question.
• WordThink – A quick and easy ‘word of the day’. Not very detailed but still fairly useful.
• FreeRice.Com – Not a ‘word of the day’ but still a fantastic resource for learning new words. There are a number of quizzes to test your knowledge of rare English words and for every correct answer, a small amount of rice will be donated to the needy via the UN World Food Program. This is a good way to expand your vocabulary and contribute to a worthy cause.

If anyone else knows of a ‘word of the day’ website that should be added to this list, then feel free to leave a comment with a link to the site in question.