Merriam-Webster Dictionary Research Articles

The Science of Upbringing, Training and Education – Historical Review, Etymological Research and Interpretation of Pedagogical Concepts

In the article, the author tries to provide the reader a view on the science of upbringing, training and education, scientifically based and supported by a number of scientific evidence. The overview of pedagogy and its main building blocks – upbringing, training and education was carried out through a number of authoritative Anglo-Saxon dictionaries and scientific sources, incl. Online Etymology Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Encyclopaedia of Higher Education, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Foundations of Philosophy, New International Encyclopedia of New York, etc. A brief historical review of the pedagogical idea from ancient times to the present day is made, and in conclusion the described pedagogical schools and concepts are separated into educational directions.

Kurangnya Minat Baca Anak Generasi Alpha Di Era Perkembangan Teknologi

The alpha generation is the children that the millenial generation has left behind. This article was written by Mark Mc Crindle and published in the Business Insider magazine (Christina Sterbenz, 2015). The Alpha Generation (2011–2025) is the most advanced generation in terms of digital technology and the least advanced generation in comparison to the previous generation. Every day, almost 2.5 million children of the Alpha Generation are born into the world. The generation most familiar with the internet over the long term is Gen A. Mc Crindler also asserts that the Alpha generation is not averse to technology, somewhat socially adept, somewhat creative, and somewhat independent. Alpha generators require quick and somewhat chaotic processes. By enticing them with a technology, they become socially alienated. This article aims to understand the challenges faced by the Alpha Generation in the Industrial Revolution. For many people, literacy is a familiar language. Literasi is a concept with a complex, dynamic, and ever-changing definition that is defined by several methods with extreme caution. According Keywords: Literacy, Technology, Development, and Generation Alpha. to an online Merriam-Webster dictionary, the words "literature" and "letter" come from the Latin and English languages, respectively. Literasi is quality, or the ability to read and write with huruf/aksara that is included in the text. Technology is described as a concept that has to do with the type of application and knowledge about how it might improve human ability to identify and modify objects that are around. At this point in time, technological advancement is experiencing relatively slow advancement. The idea of technological advancement is to advance technology from one era to the next, making it more advanced or better. The ability of the Alpha generation to communicate (read, write, study, and sketch) has somewhat declined as a result of the rapid advancement of technology. Many Alpha children nowadays are highly dependent on their gadgets (games, YouTube videos, and other apps). However, due to technological developments, alpha generation children are lagging behind in literature, which is why they are interested in reading at an age when they should be able to read and understand the content of what they read.

Historical space painting art: Its important role on the creation of space-age era in 1950s

The major purpose of this paper is to study the important role of historical painting art on the creation of space-age era eight decades ago in 1950s. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the first known use of “space age” was in 1946. In the Collins Dictionary, the space age is the present period in the history of the world when travel in space has become possible, and people use “space-age” to describe something that is very modern and makes you think of the technology of the space age. In American English, space age is the period in modern history characterized by space exploration, usually considered as beginning on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit around the Earth. In the ancient time, many artists including Giovanni di Paolo, Albrecht Dürer, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot and Vincent van Gogh created masterpieces of space related paintings. Even in the extreme ancient era, the cave art already evidenced humans’ astronomical knowledge. Besides the technological research and development for space explorations, groups of workers and artists in the areas of culture, painting, architects, installation artwork, etc. had done many contributions in the development of space-age cultural and aesthetic art before 1950s. They not only created so many masterpieces with plenty of space-age aesthetics, but witnessed and recorded the development history of the space age. It goes without doubt that historical space painting art played an important role on the creation of space-age era in 1950s. Therefore, it is mandatory to investigate and reveal the fact.

Models of Polysemy in Two English Dictionaries

Abstract In this paper we argue in favor of the radial semantic structure of polysemous entries from the New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE) and the Merriam-Webster dictionary. We formalized four polysemy theories as algorithms linking word senses into polysemy networks, considering the semantic similarity of dictionary definitions calculated using large language models. Chaining algorithms maximized similarity within polysemy nets and adequately distinguished senses that in the two dictionaries are directly related from those more distant.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE CAPITAL ASSET AND INVENTORY OF ZUANGTUI HANDLOOM ENTERPRISES IN AIZAWL, MIZORAM

Handloom as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary is any weaving device operated wholly or partially by hand or foot power. Handloom has always occupied an important position both in the economy of the country and in the hearts of the people. Handloom is the second largest provider of employment, providing employment to 31.45 lakh households through weaving and allied activities. In Mizoram, handloom provides employment to 27402 households (NCAER, 2020). The Zuangtui handloom cluster, located in the heart of Zuangtui Industrial Estate has provided great impetus to the economic development of the state. The paper aims to study the capital asset and inventory of the handloom enterprises of Zuangtui cluster such as ownership of work shed, means of transportation, types of products, loom type and quantity, etc. The study ventures into establishing the existence of correlation between the number of looms and average monthly income of the entrepreneurs. KEYWORDS: capital, entrepreneurs, handloom, loom, puan, work shed.

DEFINING THE SAME LEXEMES IN ONLINE DICTIONARIES: A CASE STUDY OF THREE POPULAR MONOLINGUAL ENGLISH DICTIONARIES

In this paper we presented the different ways in which three monolingual online English dictionaries (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online, Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries and Merriam-Webster Dictionary) define the same lexemes that belong to different language levels (from A1 to B2). Aside from the formal elements present in all of the (online) dictionaries – part of speech, pronunciation, examples, register, pictures and synonyms, we highlighted the very nature of the definitions. We studied two lexemes for each of the language levels. When analising individual examples we employed the descriptive method, while the comparison method was used to point out the key differences in which these dictionaries define concepts such as: artist, government, immortal, meanwhile, etc. The aim of the analysis and comparison was to highlight which of the aforementioned dictionaries would be suitable for high school students to use when learning English as a foreign language. We came to the following conclusions – Longman and Oxford dictionaries break down the more complex meanings into digestible instances and use language that is appropriate for the language level of the desired lexeme. Webster’s dictionary is more formal and often uses sentence patterns and words that are above the language level of the target lexeme.

A lexicographical approach to neologisms created through blending

Blending has long been regarded as an unproductive word-formation process. “Portmanteau”, a word formed through blending, can be traced back to Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking-glass, published in 1871, but the earliest words created this way were found to be in use in the late Middle English period and many of them did not survive. The number of blends failed to experience any apparent increase in the several centuries that ensued. Since the beginning of the 20th century, blending has been playing an ever-increasing role in forming neologisms. Simonini (1966) found that blend words comprised approximately 3% of new English words. Algeo’s (1991) research into neologisms revealed that about 5% of the words were blends. Among the 1,186 new words analyzed by Cook and Stevenson (2010), around 43% were blends. The growing number of new blends in the English vocabulary means the inclusion of more such words in English dictionaries. In the recent updates of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), neologisms such as shockvertising, sharenting, Xennial, and staycation are formed through blending. This paper intends to make a thorough research into new blends recorded not only in monolingual English dictionaries such as the OED, Collins English Dictionary, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary but also in bilingual dictionaries such as An English-Chinese Dictionary of Neologisms in Present-day English and A Dictionary of Blends in Contemporary English. The blends found therein will be classified, and the deficiencies in the coverage of blends in dictionaries like the OED will be discussed in detail.

Corpus Analysis as a Means of Meaning Disambiguation: Collocational Analysis of Near-Synonyms of the Verb ‘Destroy’

The current paper is aimed at corpus-based differentiation of near-synonymous lexemes with the meaning ‘to destroy’. The research implies a series of consecutive steps: to discuss synonymy-related problems in modern linguistics; to compile a list of near-synonymous lexemes with the meaning ‘to destroy’ by means of Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA); to analyze and compare definitions of the chosen verbs in Merriam-Webster Dictionary (MWD); to generate lists of right-context collocates for each of the verbs in COCA; to put the collocates into semantic clusters and compare the obtained clusters. The list of lexemes under study contains such verbs as ‘destroy’, ‘ruin’, ‘break’, ‘obliterate’, ‘raze’, ‘annihilate’, ‘crush’, ‘devastate’, ‘wreck’, and ‘demolish’. As a result, semantic clusterisation of the right-context collocates helped establish that all verbs of the group collocate with the lexemes representing values and threats where destroying values evokes negative feelings and associations while destroying threats is perceived as a positive action. The verb ‘ruin’ is typically used with the clusters ‘meals and food’, ‘holidays’, ‘leisure activities’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘human relations’, meaning deprivation of enjoyment and happiness. The verb ‘break’ has a wide array of collocates resulting in a variety of conventionalized expressions. The results of the corpus-based research of lexical semantics may be helpful to those professionally engaged in second language teaching as well as in translation and lexicographic practice.

The Translation of Near-Synonymous Names of Allah in the Holy Qur’an: A Comparative Study

This study aimed to investigate the lexical choices of the near-synonymous names of Allah in the Holy Quran, namely, (الوهّاب ، الرزّاق) , (البارئ ، المصوّر ، الخالق) , (الرءوف ، الودود ، اللطيف) in five English translations which include Muhammad Sarwar's (2011), Pickthall's (1930), Yusuf Ali's (1982), Arberry's (1955), Al-Hilali and Khan's (2018). The meanings of the names of Allah were checked based on the Qur'anic exegeses and the English equivalents selected by the five translators were looked up in Cambridge and Merriam-Webster's Dictionary in order to determine the translation that best provided the closest meanings to the Qur’anic interpretations. The study found that the slight differences in the meanings of the names of Allah were not reflected in the English lexical choices of some translators. The study recommends that translators of religious books should take into account the minor differences between words of similar meaning which are intended for specific purposes.

ENGLISH-CAUSES AND FACTORS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA: STRATEGIES TO OVERCOME

Phobia as per Merriam-Webster dictionary is an unexplained and illogical fear of something. It is very difficult to know the reasons and the roots of this fear, but in reality, this agitation does exist in minds. During the past few decades, a terror that had hit the world is Islamophobia: the (unreasonable fear of Islam and Muslims).The main source of spreading this fear in world is media. Islam is the religion that is less preached and taught in the west. Many people around the world never had any contact with Muslims and Islam. They only take Islam the way their media had portrayed it in front of them. Without having any basic knowledge of Islam that Islam is the religion of Peace, love and care. They (the effected minds) think that Islam is based on cruelty, suicide bombing, and violating human rights. This wrong and negative perception of Islam had led the term Islamophobia in western society and in new generation of Muslims too. After 9 September 2001, every incident of target killing, bombing and terrorism is linked with Islam without knowing the actual facts. Many studies have been conducted against Islam, but none have been conducted to protect and secure Islam and to erase islamophobia from west. If Muslims want to have their sacred position back in the world they need to follow the guidance by Allah and His Messenger (PBUH). The Muslims scholars should put more effort to bring the positivity of Islam in front of all mankind

What's hot and why?

What's hot and why?

Catastrophes and Cultures: Differing Approaches, Differing Responses

Introduction:The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes culture as “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.” Also noted are: “the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time.” Much has been written about the impact of culture on disaster risk and response. However, the issues are complex and multifactorial.Method:The author/presenter extensively reviewed current qualitative and quantitative literature regarding the impact of culture on disaster phases of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.Results:There are over a thousand publications on the issue of culture and disaster. While it is clear culture plays a role in the phases of disaster management, there continues to be debate as to the weight which should be placed on culture, or whether it can be seen as separate from other elements which significantly impact phases of disaster, including political, economic, technologic, geophysical, etc.Conclusion:With subject matter expertise based on lived and academic experience, the presenter plans to utilize a tabletop format to engage small groups in discussion of the above concepts as well as their experiences relating to catastrophes and cultures. The hope is that this format will spur further translational research interest.

In Search of Metonymic Motivation for Semantic Change: The Case of Words with Remarkable Origins

The aim of this paper is to account for the semantics of selected terms of Germanic, Romance and Arabic origin with surprising origins, referred to by the editors of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as the “top ten words with remarkable origins”, which initially referred to objects, animals, places and later started to be employed figuratively in various human- and nonhuman-related contexts. The theoretical framework adopted in the research embraces such tools offered by Cognitive Linguistics as conceptual metaphor and metonymy. The paper attempts to explain the conceptual motivation behind the semantics of the targeted terms and the results of the research conducted may be said to corroborate not only the conceptual nature of metaphors/metonymies as such but also their impact on social cognition.

Clinical Based Feedback

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, feedback is the transmission of evaluative or corrective information about an action, event, or process to the original or controlling source, or the return to a portion of a machine, system, or process’s output. Feedback is an essential component of the learning and development process for students. Among the most important forms of teacher-learner interaction is feedback. Medical educators have identified feedback as one of the primary catalysts needed to improve performance. Feedback on effectiveness should be provided immediately after students have observed performance behavior. Feedback is at the heart of medical education in the promotion of learning and the achievement of objectives. This paper investigates the significance of feedback in the learning experience, as well as feedback obstacles andpractical feedback guidelines.

To hele them of somme sekenesses and maladyes and all illness of the stomach. On the rivalry between illness, sickness and malady in Middle English

The present paper analyses the fates of the native nouns illness and sickness and those of the French borrowing malady in Middle English. Focusing on the regional and temporal dimensions of their rivalry, the study uses the evidence from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose (ICMEP, Markus 2008), a collection of 129 works of Middle English prose. The analysis also makes use of other databases such as Collins English Dictionary (CED), the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE), Middle English Dictionary online (MED), Merriam-Webster Dictionary (MWD), and the Oxford English Dictionary online (OED). The degree of the adaptability of the terms in question is best reflected in their varied frequency in the ICMEP’s texts. The tentative research results place malady (107 attestations in total) far behind its Germanic equivalent sickness (701 attestations). A single instance of illness testifies to its low recognisability in the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, probably due to its being often replaced by sickness, which leads to a considerable reduction in the use of the term.

Sustainable fashion in the English language mirror

The research is conducted in the critical eco-linguistics domain, an umbrella term for diverse academic inquiries and empirical evidence. The aim of the article is the analysis of English words and lexical structures used to verbalize two major aspects of sustainable fashion as a new movement and world vision – ethical fashion and conscious fashion with the focus on animals in fashion and thrifting. Sustainable fashion has a number of dimensions categorized as conscious, green, and circular, eco-friendly fashion, ethical fashion, vegan fashion. The goal of conscious fashion has much in common with environmentalism and green marketing. Ethical fashion focuses on exploitation in fashion, of both animals and humans, and encompasses animal rights, fair trade of animal-related products, working conditions in fashion industry what are quite often not decent. Vegan fashion promotes non-animal plant-based textiles and man-made fabrics. Circular fashion centres on clothes recycling, extending terminology to upcycling, downcycling and regenerating. Thrifting, renting, and sharing are to popularize slow fashion and conscious fashion. Coverage of fashion sustainability in mass media resulted into coinage of new eco-conscious words and word collocations and their increasing frequency. Several word-forming models dominate in the sustainable fashion terminology including numerous V-ing words to describe manufacturing processes and activities, non+N, non+Adj coinages to emphasize denial of traditional practices. Some words (animal, cruelty) and word-forming components (eco-) have become more noticeable in sustainable fashion in the past decade. The adjective 'sustainable' is among 1% top words in Modern English (Merriam-Webster dictionary online, n.d.) though the collocation ‘sustainable fashion’ is not fixed yet by this dictionary or its counterparts. Thus sustainable fashion is to be conceptualized to find its way to dictionaries as well as to mentality of fashion designers, clothes manufacturers and consumers worldwide. Increasing vocabulary of sustainable fashion should become more familiar to consumers to push them to rethinking their lifestyle, clothing choices, becoming eco-conscious.

Transports of Translation: Creativity and Healing

Along with the numerous cultural, religious or political functions of translation (establishing religious authority or nation-building, for instance, as with the King James Version of the Bible), along with its didactic use in language-learning and its intercultural one in aesthetic transmission and appropriation, translation can also play a healing role. Bi- or plurilingual speakers and language students often experience difficulties of various kinds, including insecurity in one of the languages, unintentional code-switching and “attacks” of awkward, embarrassing untranslatability, or conflicts of loyalty due to the “inferior” status of the mother tongue. Children who cannot translate their experience of school into the language spoken in their home, or their “interior language” (De Mattia-Viviès) for instance, or plurilingual parents unable to translate the symptoms of their child for the psychiatrist, as well as students learning foreign languages, can all benefit from the transports of translation. The polysemy of the term “transport” – both conveyance from one place to another and “an intense exaltation of mind and feelings” that “lifts one out of oneself” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary), will help us conceptualise the pedagogic and therapeutic value of practising translation. This short article will look at creative translation workshops as a means to vindicate all languages, to heal conflicted identities by facilitating and fluidifying movement between languages.

Do we screen, examine or assess to identify the "at-risk" foot in diabetes-time for agreed terms and definitions?

Do we screen, examine or assess to identify the "at-risk" foot in diabetes-time for agreed terms and definitions?

What Role Does Culture Play in the Reported Prevalence of HSDD in Women?

Culture is a term used in several ways, we will adhere to the definition proposed by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in its first meaning: “The customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.”1

THE CONCEPT SOUL IN THE ENGLISH WORLDVIEW (BASED ON THE MONOLINGUAL LEXICOGRAPHIC SOURCES)

The article focuses on the analysis of the concept soul in the English language based on the monolingual lexicographic sources. The research deals with the English monolingual dictionaries in order to shed some light on the issue of the concept soul from the point of view of the language. The aim of the investigation is to study certain English monolingual dictionaries to reveal the fixed definitions of the concept soul in various lexicographic sources and find out the cognitive features of the concept that is under research.
 It should be stressed that the research is based on the seven monolingual lexicographic sources of the English language. Thus, the investigation deals with the following dictionaries, chosen for the research: Cambridge Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Macmillan Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary. 
 The conducted investigation of the definitions of the concept soul, based on the monolingual lexicographic sources mentioned above, shows that the concept soul possesses ten different meanings that represent its cognitive features. Thus, these cognitive features form the structure of the concept soul, described in the field theory of the structure of concepts. It was discovered that the structure of the concept soul includes the core, the close periphery and the far periphery. The core consists of five cognitive features: 1) somebody’s spirit; 2) a person; 3) a person of a stated type; 4) embodiment of special quality; 5) genre of music, whereas the close periphery includes four cognitive features: 1) sense of beauty; 2) a person's moral or emotional nature; 3) the culture of African-Americans 4) the central or most important part of something and the far periphery counts only one cognitive feature – a leading figure of something. It should be emphasized that the detailed analysis of the soul issue from the point of view of the English monolingual lexicographic sources proves the diversity of the cognitive features the concept soul represents.