If you’re fascinated by rocks and spend hours digging for interesting samples in the backyard, you might be a budding geologist, a scientist who studies all things related to the Earth.
A geologist is an expert in the field of geology, the study of what the Earth is made of and how it was formed. The woman on TV explaining the history of an active volcano that’s ready to erupt? She’s probably a geologist who specializes in volcanoes. Geologists can specialize in many different aspects of the field, ranging from earthquakes to soil erosion. What they all have in common is that they’re trying to figure out how the Earth works.
Arithmetic is another word for math, specifically the areas of math having to do with numbers and calculating.
If you're good at adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying, then you're good at arithmetic, which is a big part of math. Arithmetic has to do with doing calculations. To answer most math problems, including almost all word problems, you need arithmetic. The most basic arithmetic is 2 plus 2, but as anyone who's ever taken algebra can tell you, it can get a lot more complicated than that.
Geometry is the part of mathematics that deals with calculating the distance around a circle, the angles that make up a triangle, or the amount of room inside a cube. If it involves measuring space, it’s probably geometry.
The Greek roots of geometry literally mean “to measure earth,” and over 5000 years ago farmers started using geometry to figure out how much land they owned. You study geometry in school, and you use it all the time, like calculating the best angle to cut a piece of wood for a birdhouse, or when playing a game of pool. Astronomers use geometry to measure planets millions of miles away—much easier than finding a ruler that big.
Of all the many nouns referring to a large group of things, one of the most fun is slew, as in "I saw a whole slew of birds in the tree by the river."
American English is constantly evolving, its richness coming from the many languages feeding into it. The noun slew, for instance, is from the Irish Gaelic sluagh, meaning "multitude." As an unrelated verb, it's the past tense of slay.
1.n (often followed by `of') a large number or amount or extent
2.v move obliquely or sideways, usually in an uncontrolled manner
Technically, the mass of small eggs laid by animals like fish, frogs, mollusks is called spawn. But the word has been borrowed to mean offspring, or the act of making them in general.
When someone is in league with the devil, a preacher might refer to them as “Satan’s spawn.” Your dad probably find something satanic in the kids next door when he refers to them as the neighbor’s spawn. Bill Gates’ programming project in college spawned Microsoft, a multi-billion dollar industry giant.
You might know this word from video games, where you create an avatar to represent you on screen. An avatar is something that embodies something else.
In Hinduism the different gods can take many different forms, and when they took human forms, the human was their avatar. Eventually, the word avatar came to mean the embodiment not just of a god, but also of any abstract idea. If you have a cool head, you might see yourself as the avatar of reasonableness in a fight. Video game avatars are sort of a reverse of the first meaning––a physical entity (you) form becomes something abstract (a video game guy).
1.n the manifestation of a Hindu deity (especially Vishnu) in human o…