Logophiles dominate Vocabulary.com contest

“Vocabulary.com is the bomb,” said PreAP English II teacher Brian Wolf about the educational website.

On Nov. 13, Vocabulary.com honored English students for having mastered the most terms in the month of October. Houston Independent School District (HISD) had purchased rights to the online resource earlier this year.

“Currently, all of the sophomore PreAP English classes are using it,” Wolf said. “Some of our freshman classes are using it as well.”

The lunch-time presentation occurred in the Science Conference Center. Students sat at a handful of tables. A few teachers milled around about halfway across the room, made small talk with visiting representatives, sneaked glances at the black-and-green banner fanned next to those five shiny medals. The school received a banner from the website. Students Emily Pan, Martin Sirakoz, Omar Uraimov, Anna Jorgensen and William Stewart were awarded medals for winning the most points.

Sophomore Emily Pan shared that the goal of leaderboard-rank was not the sole incentive in her endeavors.

“Competing with another kid in my class inspired me to do even more words every day,” Pan said. “We were like neck in neck; it was pretty intense.”

But in addition to a contest, Vocabulary.com also constituted homework assignments and test reviews. Wolf required his students to do the practice until they reached mastery of all the terms. Sophomore William Stewart found the site to provide good practice for the Wolf’s tests.

“It really helps me learn the vocabulary,” Stewart said. “ There are other ways I study for tests, but I feel like Vocabulary.com really helps to nail it down.”

Pan agreed with this evaluation.

“Sites like Quizlet, which also deal a lot with vocabulary, are a lot less complex in that a lot of their text is just like rote memorization,” Pan said. “But with vocabulary.com you get a variety of questions that require you to think about words in different ways, and I think that helps a lot in the levels of learning a word.”