Reading - Learn to Read and then Read to Learn

Reading is the cognitive process of understanding a written linguistic message. Reading is to interpret and make sense of a language that is written, printed or spoken. The reading process is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols in order to construct or derive meaning. Reading is a means of language acquisition, communication, and the sharing of information and ideas. Reading Comprehension is understanding a mental representation of the meaning or the significance of something.



Learning to Read is the acquisition and practice of the skills necessary to understand the meaning behind printed words or symbols. For a fairly good reader, the skill of reading often feels simple, effortless, and automatic; however, the process of learning to read is complex and builds on cognitive, linguistic, and social skills developed from a very early age.

Learn to Read and Read to Learn at the same time. When learning how to read you should be reading words that teach you about yourself and the world around you. When learning how to read you should be learning the words that make you a better reader and a better person.

Like with all languages, reading is a complex interaction between the text and the reader which is shaped by the reader’s prior knowledge, experiences, attitude, and language community which is culturally and socially situated. The reading process requires continuous practice, development, and refinement. In addition, reading requires creativity and critical analysis. Consumers of literature make ventures with each piece, innately deviating from literal words to create images that make sense to them in the unfamiliar places the texts describe. Because reading is such a complex process, it cannot be controlled or restricted to one or two interpretations. There are no concrete laws in reading, but rather allows readers an escape to produce their own products introspectively. This promotes deep exploration of texts during interpretation. Readers use a variety of reading strategies to assist with decoding (to translate symbols into sounds or visual representations of speech) and comprehension. Readers may use context clues to identify the meaning of unknown words. Readers integrate the words they have read into their existing framework of knowledge or schema (schemata theory). Other types of reading are not speech based writing systems, such as music notation or pictograms. The common link is the interpretation of symbols to extract the meaning from the visual notations or tactile signals (as in the case of braille).

Literacy - Formats - Grammar - Nouns - Labels - Context - Symbols - Word Spacing - Reading Speeds - Phonics

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” Theodor Seuss Geisel.

"Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything". Analogies.

“The greatest gift is a passion for reading." – Elizabeth Hardwick

“The reading of all good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries.” – Rene Descartes

“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.” – Confucius

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader." – Margaret Fuller

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin

“If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.” – J.K. Rowling

“Books make great gifts, they have the whole world inside of them." – Neil Gaiman

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free." – Frederick Douglass

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." – Ray Bradbury

Book Smart is a person who learns greatly from books, as opposed to practical experience, or street smarts.

Humans naturally learn to speak first, with reading and writing often coming later in development, meaning someone could have strong spoken skills without fully mastering the written language. It's possible to speak a language fluently while not being able to read it because speaking primarily relies on listening and oral communication, while reading requires additional visual processing and understanding of written characters, which can be learned separately and at a different pace; essentially, you might have acquired spoken language through immersion or conversation but not practiced reading the written form extensively. While speaking involves pronunciation and grammar, reading requires recognizing written characters and understanding their meaning, which can be a separate learning process.

Reading is a form of deliberate learning, you can read what you want to read and read at your own speed and stop reading at anytime, which gives you time to think about what has been written. And being able to stop reading also gives you time to do more research and learn more about what has been written, which would give you a better understanding of what has been written. This keeps the process of learning moving forward, but you still have to read the right things at the right time, deliberately learn what you need to learn and learn the right things at the right time. But reading has vulnerabilities, because just knowing how to read is not enough, and only the beginning. Now you have to read the right things at the right time. And you also need to learn how to comprehend meaning and also see the whole picture of the message, and not just the words. Though reading the right things at the right time does not always happen, you should at least understand why it's important. Learning is more effective and more efficient, but only when you understand why.

Reading is a form of listening. You get to choose who to listen to and you don't have to worry about missing a word because all the words are written. The only problem with having only the written word is when you compared it to having a face to face conversation. When you only have the written word, there is no one to ask questions about the true meaning of something that has been written. But not every one on one conversation will give you the chance to ask questions. So it's good to do both. Read a lot, and talk to people when you can. The Key is listening and learning. Reading is listening with your eyes.

Learning how to read will not guarantee success if the person never reads the right books. A person who can read will have very little advantage over a person who can't read at all. Knowing how to read is extremely important, but knowing how to effectively use this skill is even more important. Having access to the worlds most valuable knowledge and information is extremely important. "If you don't read the things that matter, than knowing how to read will not matter".

Reading to Learn - Count the Things that Matter - Remember the Things that Matter - Learning the Things that Matter

Research-Backed Reading Methods are almost useless if the person never reads the things that matter. Some research can be flawed, like with Lucy Calkins Units of Study. There is also Balanced literacy, which is a teaching method for reading and writing that combines phonics and whole language instruction. The approach aims to develop reading and writing skills through a variety of environments and to promote a love of reading. While balanced literacy can help many students develop a love of reading, it may not work for every student. Some say that balanced literacy can include ineffective strategies, like three-cueing, and may not provide the structured instruction needed for students with learning disabilities.

Phonemic Awareness - Phonics - Fluency - Vocabulary - Comprehension

Many children in the United States cannot read at a basic level. Reading proficiency among some school-aged children has been declining reading scores among 13-year-olds have dropped since 2012, with a sharper dip during and after the pandemic. While test scores for 9-year-olds have mostly held steady since 2012, they too suffered a decline during the pandemic.

The Right to Read is a 2023 film that shares the stories of an NAACP activist, a teacher, and two American families who fight to provide our youngest generation with the most foundational indicator of life-long success: the ability to read.

Children may learn new words better when they learn them in the context of other words they are just learning.

Studying how children learn words with no meaning. Project leaders at the MIT Language Acquisition Lab say their research could shed new light on the nature of language learning. Research into first language acquisition involves looking at children's developing understanding of what structures are allowed in their language, how those structures are interpreted, and how they may be used in conversation. The standard assumption is that word learning is a process of mapping word-forms to meaning. Expletives are immediately interesting as they clearly don't conform to this assumption.

Knowledge of building blocks of words plays an important role when deaf children learn to read, analysis shows. An understanding of how words can be broken down into smaller units of meaning plays a key role when deaf and hard of hearing children learn to read, analysis shows. knowledge of roots, prefixes, and suffixes -- morphological awareness -- helps children to learn new words and expand their vocabulary. This is the first meta-analytic study to show its importance for those who have hearing loss. Morphological awareness can even be more important for them than phonology -- and the use of phonics.

You are what you Read. If your body is a reflection of what you eat, then your mind is a reflection of what you read and study. Fill it with good stuff, not candy, like social media. You are what you Know.

The Power of Words - The Power of Language

"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." ~ Henry David Thoreau.

Reading for pleasure falls after primary school years. A significant drop in boys' reading enjoyment between the ages of eight and 16 - from 72% at ages eight-to-11 to 36% at ages 14-16. Girls' pleasure in picking up a book also dropped off in the teenage years, though not quite as markedly. At ages eight-to-11, 83% of girls said they enjoyed reading, but this dropped back to 53% at ages 14-16. If you don't enjoy Learning and Reading, then you have not learned anything of value.

Poor Reading Skills is why Fewer Men Go to College. Boys' poor reading skills might help explain higher education gender gap. Study finds ability to read well can help explain why fewer men go to college than women.

Reading builds resilience among at-risk kids. New research from the shows that reading aloud can triple a child's resilience at school, particularly for children at-risk.

Videos about Why Reading Matters:
[BBC] Why Reading Matters Part 1 of 6] (youtube)

Patricia Ryan: Don't insist on English! (youtube)

Reading in Content Areas - With Research-Based CRISS Strategies (youtube)

ABeCeDarian Storybooks (youtube)

Bibliophilic is the love of books.

Bibliography is the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects.

Bibliophile is an individual who loves to read, admires books and collects books.

Book worm is someone who spends a great deal of time reading.

Bibliophobia is the fear or hatred of books.

Book Types - Speed Reading - Word Games

Why do kids read more cereal boxes instead of reading things of value? Kids need to learn how to maximize their time learning so they can have more time having fun and more time exploring the world, the way a kid should. Childhood can be a glorious journey if children can just learn the right things at the right time.

774 million people in the world are illiterate and two thirds are women. Low health Literacy cost the U.S. 238 billion per year. About 30 million people, 14 percent of the US population 16 and older, have trouble with basic reading and writing. 18 million adults don’t read well enough to earn a living wage. 63% of prison inmates can’t read. About 30 million people, 14 percent of the US population 16 and older, have trouble with basic reading and writing. More Stats.

Learning How to Read

When learning how to read English, the child must figure out the relationship between sounds and letters. Thus, the beginning reader must learn the connections between the approximately 44 sounds or phonemes of spoken English, and the 26 letters of the alphabet. Why are phoneme awareness and the development of the alphabetic principle so critical for the beginning reader? Because if children cannot perceive the sounds in spoken words – for example, if they cannot "hear" the at sound in fat and cat and perceive that the difference lies in the first sound, they will have difficulty decoding or "sounding out" words in a rapid and accurate fashion. Children vary in the amount of practice that is required for fluency and automaticity in reading to occur. Some youngsters can read a word only once to recognize it again with greater speed; others need 20 or more exposures. The average child needs between four and 14 exposures to automatize the recognition of a new word. The ultimate goal of reading instruction is to enable children to understand what they read and then read to understand.

Emerging Literacy begins in infancy as a parent helps their child develop language skills. This pleasant interaction helps the baby learn about the give and take of conversation and the pleasures of communicating with other people.

Emergent Literacies is a term that is used to explain a child's knowledge of reading and writing skills before they learn how to read and write words. It signals a belief that, in literate society, young children—even one- and two-year-olds—are in the process of becoming literate. Through the support of parents, caregivers, and educators, a child can successfully progress from emergent to conventional reading. The basic components of emergent literacy include: Print motivation: Being interested in and enjoying books. Vocabulary: Knowing the names of things. Print awareness: Noticing print, knowing how to handle a book, and knowing how to follow words on a page. Narrative skills: Being able to describe things and events and to tell stories. Letter knowledge: Understanding letters are different from each other, knowing their names and sounds, and recognizing letters everywhere. Phonological awareness: Being able to hear and play with the smaller sounds in words. Emergent literacy is of critical importance in early education in light of research showing that children learn skills that prepare them to read years before they start school.

Reading Level is simply a way to identify how complex a book a child can read independently. You might be tempted to reason that if your child is in the second grade, then books that are labeled for second graders will be the perfect fit for him.

Guided Reading is an instructional approach that involves a teacher working with a small group of students who demonstrate similar reading behaviors and can read similar levels of texts. The text is easy enough for students to read with your skillful support; it offers challenges and opportunities for problem solving, but is easy enough for students to read with some fluency. You choose selections that help students expand their strategies. You select books that students can read with about 90 to 94 percent accuracy. Students can understand and enjoy the story because it's accessible to them through their own strategies, supported by your introduction. They focus on meaning but also use problem-solving strategies to figure out words they don't know, deal with difficult sentence structure, and understand concepts or ideas they have never before encountered in print.

Readers should know how to do research using multiple sources. Readers should know how to analyze themes, and be able to read complex fiction and nonfiction works. Decoding is the ability to use patterns to figure out words and decipher their separate sounds. Fluency is reading quickly and accurately. The reader should regularly draw on their ability to figure out new words to read accurately. A good way to think of phonics is being able to easily see “chunks” in words to figure out a word’s meaning. A good reader will also learn more advanced prefixes (e.g. ex- in excavate, extract, exhale) and suffixes (e.g. -ible in audible, plausible, legible) and use them to decode dozens of multisyllabic words, such as pedestrian and exasperate. A reader should understand what they read and be able to read it aloud accurately, smoothly, and with plenty of expression. Readers should examine all types of literature, including novels, dramas and poetry, but focus more on nonfiction or focus more on factual information and knowledge based literature, such as science, math, communication, media literacy, learning styles, problem solving, engineering, energy, food and nutrition, intelligence, information literacy, morality, relationships, social intelligence, human sexuality, body image and so on. Readers should learn how to analyze multiple points of view and learn a topic from different sources and understand how the information varies based on the source. A reader should use evidence to compare and summarize what they read in order to determine a story’s theme or the main point of a message. A good reader should be able to take in the information and digest it accurately. Readers should continue to learn about structure and pay attention to the organization of what they’re reading. Focusing on banking facts and saving knowledge for future use.

Reading Skills that every reader should have, including, summarizing a text’s main points and explaining how those points are supported by specific details. Pointing out how an author is using evidence to explain or support their topic overall and the points within the topic. Giving in-depth descriptions of characters, setting, and events in a story. Explaining the relationship or interaction between two or more individuals, events, or ideas based on specific information in one or more texts. A readers vocabulary plays an important role in helping a student become college-ready. Every reader should be acquiring a firm grasp of language and its basic conventions. A reader should be able to intuitively figure out more complicated unknown words, relying on skills including using a text’s context for clues and recognizing common affixes and root words to decipher a word’s meaning (e.g. photograph, photosynthesis). Also, she should regularly be using dictionaries, thesauruses, and glossaries to look up words and phrases. Readers should learn how to use figurative language, such as similes (e.g. busy as a bee), metaphors (e.g. you are what you eat), alliteration (e.g. she sells seashells by the seashore), and a favorite, hyperbole (a.k.a. wild exaggeration). Readers should be able to recognize common idioms (e.g. jump on the bandwagon) and proverbs (e.g. two wrongs do not make a right). They can also rely on the relationship between words — using synonyms, antonyms, and homographs — to better understand new words.

Accelerated Reader is a website used by teachers and parents to improve or "accelerate" their reading skills.

Developmental Reading Assessment is an individually administered assessment of a child's reading capabilities. It is a tool to be used by instructors to identify a students reading level, accuracy, fluency, and comprehension.

Lexile Reader Measure represents a person's reading ability on the Lexile scale. A Lexile text measure represents a text's difficulty level on the Lexile scale. When used together, they can help a reader choose a book or other reading material that is at an appropriate difficulty level.

Lexile is to obtain a Lexile measure for a book or article, text is split into 125-word slices. Each slice is compared to the nearly 600-million word Lexile corpus, which is taken from a variety of sources and genres, and the words in each sentence are counted.

A Level 1 book is generally for ages 3 to 6, and a Level 2 book is usually good for ages 4 to 8.

Research shows why some children may be slower to learn words. A new study investigates where toddlers look when they learn new words. It finds that children with larger vocabularies looked quickly towards objects when learning new words. Meanwhile, children who knew fewer words looked back and forth between objects and took more time. The research team say that their findings could help identify children with delays in language development at an earlier stage. Importantly, it means these children could be given earlier support to build their best vocabulary before starting school. Children learn that if you hear a new word, other objects that are the same shape can also most likely be called by this name. This helps them learn new words quickly because they have an idea what a new word means right away. But there may be differences in the way that children who struggle with language learn new words and understand what new words mean. We found that children who can say more words quickly looked towards objects that were the same shape as a named object. Children who knew fewer words looked back and forth between the objects and took more time.

Two brain networks are activated while reading, study finds. When a person reads a sentence, two distinct networks in the brain are activated, working together to integrate the meanings of the individual words to obtain more complex, higher-order meaning, according to a new study. From these recordings, they identified two brain networks that play a key role in the reading process. One network involves a region of the brain's frontal lobe that sends signals to the temporal lobe, which shows progressive activation when a person is building up complex meaning along the length of a sentence. The second network involves another region of the brain's temporal lobe that sends signals to an area of the frontal lobe, allowing understanding of the context of a sentence to enable easier comprehension and processing of each new word that is read.

Resources for Learning How to Read - Star Fall (Learn to Read - Phonics - ABC's - Math) - Learn to Read and Learn the Alphabet Online - Click n Kids - Your Child Learns.

Software for Learning to Read - Learn to Read Software Review - Learn to Read Software Review - Reading Software (amazon) - Software Children's Reading (amazon) - ABC Mouse Years 2-6, 450 Lessons, 3,000 Learning Activities, Virtual Field Trips and Games. 

Reading Resources - Head Sprout - Global Learning Xprize - Learning Xprize - Leveled Instruction - Five Practices Talk, Sing, Read, Write and Play. - Reading Lesson - Reading Rockets - Learn to Read 1: Phonics & Rhyming - The Kids' Picture Show (Fun & Educational Learning Video) - National Reading Panel - Teach Your Child to Read - Your Baby Can Read - Succeed to Read - Reading Partners - Everybody Wins NY - Good Reads - Read Write Think - Reading is Fundamental - First Book - International Reading Assoc. - Book Reading Light (amazon) - Story Bird - Teacher Mate - ABC of Reading (wiki) - English Course Videos (youtube) - English Tips - English Grammar Lessons - English Language Lessons Word Knowledge

Teaching Children to Read - Tutoring Help - Stages of Learning

Reading Difficulties: Dyslexia - Learning Difficulties

Phonics (sounds) - Spelling - Letters - Words - Symbols - Code

Bookmark is a website link that quickly directs you to a place in a document without needed to scroll.

Related Subjects - Word Games - Vocabulary - Labels - Sign Language - Meanings - Context - Grammar - Sentences - Nouns - Writing Tips - Book Types - Online Books - E-Books - Child Development Books - Library's - Teaching Resources - Online Education.

Explicit instruction provides dramatic benefits in learning to read. People who were taught to read by receiving explicit instructions on the relationship between sounds and spelling experienced a dramatic improvement compared to learners who discovered this relationship naturally through the reading process. The ability to read is foundational to education.

Reading Recovery, which is an intensive one-on-one reading intervention instruction program, has its effectiveness questioned, so school districts have been dropping the program, but today it's still in nearly 2,000 schools in 41 states. The program's high cost is estimated to be up to $10,271 per student. Many first grade students struggle with reading and for some of these students, low literacy achievement in first grade can set them up for continued difficulty in literacy throughout elementary school and beyond. The Reading Recovery program is based on the idea that individualized, short-term, and highly-responsive instruction delivered by an expert teacher can disrupt this trajectory and allow the lowest achieving students to catch up to their peers. This study is a follow-up study to an i3-funded scale-up study of the Reading Recovery program. These students receive 12- to 20-week cycles of daily, 30-minute, one-on-one lessons from specially trained Reading Recovery expert teachers. Lessons target phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Reading Recovery teachers receive specialized training that prepares them to tailor lessons to an individual student’s strengths and needs. Each lesson begins with re-reading familiar books, followed by word and letter work, story composition, assembling a cut-up sentence, and previewing and reading a new book. Reading Recovery also relies on continuous collection of data to gauge student progress. At least 2.4 million students in the United States have participated in Reading Recovery or its Spanish-language counterpart since 1984, when the program first came to America from New Zealand. The program is also used in Australia, Canada and England, among other countries. Children who seem unlikely to respond to Reading Recovery tutoring, typically the lowest of the low achievers, are removed from the program and referred on. In most Reading Recovery evaluations, these students are not included in the treatment groups, which strongly biases the results in favor of Reading Recovery. These findings draw attention to the major shortcoming of the instructional philosophy of Reading Recovery, which is that it stresses the importance of using information from many sources in identifying unfamiliar words without recognizing that skills and strategies involving phonological information are of primary importance in beginning literacy development (Tunmer &Chapman, 2003). This instructional emphasis reflects Clay’s (1991) strong top-down theoretical orientation to fluent reading, according to which minimal word-level information is used to confirm language predictions. Clay (1991) claims that, “In efficient rapid word perception the reader relies mostly on the sentence and its meaning and some selected features of the forms of words” (p.8). From this incorrect assumption, it follows that reading acquisition is largely a matter of learning to rely increasingly on the syntactic and semantic redundancies of language to generate hypotheses about the text yet to be encountered. Children are therefore urged to use preceding passage content, sentence context cues and picture cues as the primary strategies for identifying unfamiliar words in text, with letter-sound cues being used very sparingly and mainly to confirm language predictions. Clay (1998) specifically states that beginning readers “need to use their knowledge of how the world works; the possible meanings of the text; the sentence structure; the importance of order of ideas, or words, or of letters; the size of words or letters; special features of sound, shape, and layout; and special knowledge from past literary experiences before [emphasis added] they resort to left-to-right sounding out of chunks or letter clusters or, in the last resort, single letters”. This view of reading and the theoretical assumptions upon which it is based, has been rejected by the scientific community. Pressley (1998), for example, stated that “the scientific evidence is simply overwhelming that letter-sound cues are more important in recognizing words than either semantic or syntactic cues” (p.16). Research has shown that predicting words from context is a highly ineffective learning strategy that is preferred by poor readers, not good (Tunmer & Chapman, 2002). Children should therefore be encouraged to look for familiar spelling patterns first and to use context to confirm partial decoding attempts (Tunmer & Chapman, 998, in press). Another major criticism of the instructional philosophy of Reading Recovery concerns the degree of explicitness and detail with which word-level skills and strategies are taught. Although Reading Recovery’s literature-based approach to reading instruction (in which word analysis activities arise primarily from the child’s responses during text reading) may be suitable for many children, struggling beginning readers appear to require a more highly structured, systematic approach with particular attention focused on the development of phonologically-based skills and strategies. As Adams and Bruck (1993) argued, “wherever children who cannot discover the alphabetic principle independently are denied explicit instruction on the regularities and conventions of letter strings, reading disability may well be the result” (p.131). In support of these claims, we (Chapman et al., 2001) found in a longitudinal study of beginning literacy development in a whole language instructional context, that children independently selected by their schools for Reading Recovery showed major difficulties in detecting sound sequences in words (phonological awareness) and in relating letters to sounds (alphabetic coding) during the year preceding entry into the program. Participation in Reading Recovery did not appreciably reduce these deficiencies, and the failure to remedy these problems severely limited the immediate and long-term effectiveness of the program. The few children who received some benefit from Reading Recovery were more advanced in phonological processing skills at the beginning of the program than children who derived little or no benefit from the program, and progress in learning to read following participation in Reading Recovery was strongly related to phonological processing skills at discontinuation from the program. Most importantly, Reading Recovery failed significantly to improve the literacy development of children considered to have succeeded in the program. These children showed no signs of accelerated reading performance, and one year after completion of the program, they were performing around one year below age-appropriate levels. The results of the study strongly suggest that it is not an effective intervention strategy to place children into a remedial reading program that uses the same methods that most likely contributed to the failure in the first place. There are two major advantages in providing struggling readers with explicit and systematic instruction in orthography patterns and word identification strategies outside the context reading connected text rather than relying on “mini-lessons” given in response to children’s oral reading errors during text reading. First, instruction in word analysis skills that deliberately separated from meaningful context allows children to pay full attention to the letter-sound patterns that are being taught. This approach helps children to learn word-decoding skills that may be useful in reading all texts, not just a specific text. Second, including isolated word study in remedial reading programs helps struggling readers to overcome their tendency to rely on ineffective ways of figuring out unknown words in text such as using picture cues and sentence context cues to identify unfamiliar words rather than using these cues to supplement word-level information. In support of this claim we (Iversen Tunmer, 1993) found that the effectiveness of Reading Recovery instruction could be improved considerably by incorporating into the program more intensive and explicit instruction in phonologic awareness and alphabetic coding skills, in combination with strategy training on how and when to use this knowledge during text reading. The arguments and evidence in support of including more explicit training in phonological processing skills in Reading Recovery draw attention to another major shortcoming of the program. The assessment battery used in Reading Recovery does not include tests that provide teachers with more comprehensive knowledge of children’s control over vital aspects of the reading acquisition process; namely, phonological awareness, knowledge of spelling-to-sound patterns, and knowledge of word-based strategies for identifying unfamiliar words. In addition, the major outcome measure of Reading Recovery, reading book level, appears to be a highly unreliable measure of reading achievement that yields inflated estimates of children’s progress (Tunmer & Chapman, 2003).

Reading to Learn - Critical Reading

When you're learning how to read, what you are reading should be relative to your educational needs and give you a better understanding of yourself and a better understanding of the world around you. When learning how to read, at the same time you should be learning how to understand and comprehend the meaning of words, and also learn how to understand why the context can change the meaning of words. But the most important thing when reading to learn is to have access to the worlds most valuable knowledge. If you don't consume the worlds most valuable knowledge and information at the right time and in the right order, you will never utilize your full potential. So never under estimate the value of knowledge. Your life depends on knowing and understanding, and the earth and everyone else depends on you knowing and understanding. So everyone and everything depends on knowledge.

Active Reading is a deliberate and intentional way of reading that involves making meaning of the text and taking specific steps to do so. It's more productive and enjoyable than passive reading, and can also save you time. And don't feel like you need to read the entire text in one sitting. You should also take notes or document information that is valuable. Active Learning.

Reading Critically is to evaluate the text for its relevance to your needs. Comprehension.

Critical Reading is a form of language analysis that does not take the given text at face value, but involves a deeper examination of the claims put forth as well as the supporting points and possible counter-arguments. The ability to reinterpret and reconstruct for improved clarity and readability is also a component of critical reading. The identification of possible ambiguities and flaws in the author's reasoning, in addition to the ability to address them comprehensively, are essential to this process. Critical reading, much like academic writing, requires the linkage of evidential points to corresponding arguments.

Critical Literacy is the ability to find embedded discrimination in media. This is done by analyzing the messages promoting prejudiced power relationships found naturally in media and written material that go unnoticed otherwise by reading beyond the author's words and examining the manner in which the author has conveyed their ideas about society's norms to determine whether these ideas contain racial or gender inequality. Information Literacy - Media Literacy.

Critical Thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments in order to form a judgment by the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluation. Critical Thinking.

Exegesis is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text.

Reading with a Purpose is to read and learn something valuable, or reading to acquire valuable information. The purpose of reading is to gain information. Reading with a purpose can help you sort out what information is important and what is not. Reading with a purpose means having a clear understanding of why you are reading and what you want to achieve from the material. It is an active reading strategy that can help you better understand and retain what you read. Before you start reading, consider why you are reading and what you want to get out of it.

The best advice in life to give anyone is to tell them to learn how to read and then read to learn.

Learning to Read should be an incredible journey and reading should be constantly moving you forward in life.

Get Paid to Learn - Learn What Matters Most

Write to learn, speak to learn, listen to learn, count to learn, eat to learn, sleep to learn, experience to learn.

Balanced Literacy uses both whole language and phonics. The goal of a balanced literacy program is to include the strongest elements of each. The components of a 'balanced literacy' approach are as follows: The read aloud, guided reading, shared reading, interactive writing, shared writing, Reading Workshop, Writing Workshop and Word study). Letters.

Reading Process is a complex "cognitive process" of decoding symbols in order to construct or derive meaning (reading comprehension). Reading is a means of language acquisition, communication, and of sharing information and ideas.

Readability - Comprehension - Aptitude - Competence - Child Development

It was believed that the fourth grade was when students stop learning to read and started reading to learn, but that was only when they had access to valuable knowledge and information. Reading Shift Theory.

Three of the most important things in your life is, 1: Learn How to Read. 2: Learn how to Comprehend what you are Reading. 3: Read the most Valuable Knowledge and Information that you can find, things that will increase your understanding of yourself and things that will increase your understanding of the world around you. 

Learn to Read and then Read to Learn, but remember, the Person who does not Read the Right Books has very little advantage over a person who can't read at all.

"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." Henry David Thoreau

And with over a 130 million Books with over 2 trillion words you can easily say that there is not a lot of time to be wasted on reading things that will not benefit you. Math Too. Why learn to read and write if you never read anything of value or write anything of Value? And what happens if you never learn what is Valuable?

Censorship - Attacks on Books

There's a huge difference between someone who is literate and someone who has excellent reading comprehension. One knows only how to read, and the other fully understands what they are reading.

Why are literacy rates misleading?

Most Literate Countries: Finland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, United States, Germany, Latvia, Netherlands.

Just because some one has been labeled as literate, this does not mean that they have intelligence.

Literacy rates only show how many people can read, it does not say that people have read things that are valuable or important, things that would make them educated and aware.

If you don't read the things that matter, then knowing how to read doesn't matter. Count the Things that Matter.

Comprehending what you read is just the beginning.

Concentrating on word sounds helps reading instruction and intervention.

What Reading Comprehension level should you have in order to induce independent learning?

Phonics - Speech Sounds

Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing of the English Language by developing learners' phonemic awareness—the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes—in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them. The goal of phonics is to enable beginning readers to decode new written words by sounding them out, or, in phonics terms, blending the sound-spelling patterns. Since it focuses on the spoken and written units within words, phonics is a sublexical approach and, as a result, is often contrasted with whole language, a word-level-up philosophy for teaching reading.

Speech Impediments - Human Voice

Articulatory phonetics is the study of the production of speech sounds by the articulatory and vocal tract by the speaker.

Acoustic phonetics is the study of the physical transmission of speech sounds from the speaker to the listener.

Auditory phonetics is the study of the reception and perception of speech sounds by the listener.

Accents - Tones - Pronunciation - Nouns

These areas are inter-connected through the common mechanism of sound, such as wavelength (pitch), amplitude, and harmonics.

English is an alphabetic language with only 26 letters, but there are 44 speech sounds or phonemes. This includes 20 vowel sounds, and 24 consonant sounds. Phonemes are the unit sound differentiating one word from the another. These 44 phonemes consist of the following sounds. (Five short vowel sounds: short a, short e, short i, short o, short u) - (Five long vowel sounds: long a, long e, long i, long o, long u) - (Two other vowel sounds: oo, ōō) - (Five r-controlled vowel sounds: ar, ār, ir, or, ur) - (Eighteen consonant sounds: b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, z) - (Seven digraphs: th(unvoiced), th(voiced), ng, sh, ch, zh, wh) - (Two vowel diphthongs: ow, oy)

44 Phonemes (PDF)

Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. Phonology is the study of the sound system of a given language and the analysis and classification of its phonemes.

Phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language.

Phonetics – The Sound of American English.

Phonetics Flash Animation Project: University of Iowa.

Vowel is a speech sound made with the vocal tract open. 5 of the 26 Alphabet Letters are vowels: A, E, I, O, and U. The letter Y is sometimes considered a sixth vowel because it can sound like other vowels. Unlike consonants, each of the vowel letters has more than one type of sound or can even be silent with no sound at all

Vowel is a sound in spoken language, with two competing definitions. In the more common phonetic definition, a vowel is a sound pronounced with an open vocal tract, so that the tongue does not touch the lips, teeth, or roof of the mouth, such as the English "ah"  or "oh". There is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as the English "sh", which have a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. In the other, phonological definition, a vowel is defined as syllabic, the sound that forms the peak of a syllable. A phonetically equivalent but non-syllabic sound is a semivowel. In oral languages, phonetic vowels normally form the peak (nucleus) of many to all syllables, whereas consonants form the onset and (in languages that have them) coda. Some languages allow other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable, such as the syllabic (i.e., vocalic) in the English word table  (when not considered to have a weak vowel sound:) or the syllabic r in the Serbo-Croatian word vrt "garden".

Elision is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase. Sometimes sounds are elided to make a word easier to pronounce. The word elision is frequently used in linguistic description of living languages, and deletion is often used in historical linguistics for a historical sound change.

Consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are [p], pronounced with the lips; [t], pronounced with the front of the tongue; [k], pronounced with the back of the tongue; [h], pronounced in the throat; [f] and [s], pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and [m] and [n], which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels. Tone.

International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators and translators. IPA-International-Phonetic Alphabet.

Novel software assesses phonologial awareness. Understanding sounds in language is a critical building block for child literacy, yet this skill is often overlooked. Researchers have now developed a new software tool to assess children's phonological awareness -- or, how they process the sound structure of words.

Applied Phonetics (youtube)

What If English Were Phonetically Consistent? (youtube)

Extra practice blending letter sounds helps struggling readers. New research has shown that extra practice in blending printed letter sounds can help struggling beginner readers (age 4-5) learn to read. The use of synthetic phonics to teach reading to children in reception (age 4-5) classes has improved attainment. A new study shows that extra help in blending the sounds in words is most effective in improving the skills essential for reading. Pupils learn to identify graphemes, match them with phonemes, and blend the phonemes together to form the sound of the complete words (for example c-a-t = "k -- æ -- t" = "cat"). This is known as blending. To learn successfully in this way, children need 'letter sound knowledge' (LSK) -- awareness of the sounds represented by letters/graphemes and 'phonological awareness' (PA) -- the awareness of individual sounds in words.

Children who match sounds to letters earlier learn to read faster. Text to Speech Tools - Own-Voice Intensive Phonics.

When Words Sound the Same as other Words - Puns (word play)

“Touch Hear” simply by touching a word or phrase, one can listen to related information such as its pronunciation or meaning. The gadget “whispers” the information into the ear, thus enabling one to read on without having to stop and check up the dictionary.

Why reading nursery rhymes and singing to babies may help them to learn language. Phonetic information -- the smallest sound elements of speech -- may not be the basis of language learning in babies as previously thought. Babies don't begin to process phonetic information reliably until seven months old -- which researchers say is too late to form the foundation of language. Instead, babies learn from rhythmic information -- the changing emphasis of syllables in speech -- which unlike phonetic information, can be heard in the womb. Poems- Music Therapy.

25 percent of young participants who had reading difficulties showed mild or moderate hearing impairment.

Glottal Stop is a consonant formed by the audible release of the airstream after complete closure of the glottis. It is widespread in some nonstandard English accents and in some other languages, such as Arabic, it is a standard consonant. Glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is. As a result of the obstruction of the airflow in the glottis, the glottal vibration either stops or becomes irregular with a low rate and sudden drop in intensity. Singing.

Syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter and its stress patterns.

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs (phones): their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status. Phonology, on the other hand, is concerned with the abstract, grammatical characterization of systems of sounds or signs.

Phonological is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. It has traditionally focused largely on the study of the systems of phonemes in particular languages (and therefore used to be also called phonemics, or phonematics), but it may also cover any linguistic analysis either at a level beneath the word (including syllable, onset and rime, articulatory gestures, articulatory features, mora, etc.) or at all levels of language where sound is considered to be structured for conveying linguistic meaning. Phonology also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages.

Phone in phonetics is any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words. In contrast, a phoneme is a speech sound that, in a given language, if it were swapped with another phoneme, would change the meaning of the word. Phones are absolute, not specific to any language, but phonemes can be discussed only in reference to specific languages. Tone - Context.

Phonetic Transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds (or phones). The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. (Phonetic Transcription is also known as phonetic script or phonetic notation).

Pronunciation is the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect.

Pronunciation Respelling is a regular phonetic respelling of a word that does have a standard spelling, so as to indicate the pronunciation. Pronunciation respellings are sometimes seen in dictionaries.

Mnemonic (memory)

NATO Phonetic Alphabet. The 26 code words in the NATO phonetic alphabet are assigned to the 26 letters of the English alphabet in alphabetical order as follows: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu. Phonetic Alphabets (image chart)

IPA for English id the pronunciation of words in English. IPA Conventions for English (wiki) - Notes

Phonemic Awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning. Separating the spoken word "cat" into three distinct phonemes, /k/, /æ/, and /t/, requires phonemic awareness. The National Reading Panel has found that phonemic awareness improves children's word reading and reading comprehension, as well as helping children learn to spell. Phonemic awareness is the basis for learning phonics.

Phonological Awareness is an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of words. Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability and has, therefore, been the focus of much research.

The Sound of Your Own Voice (singing)

Sound Change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation (phonetic change) or sound system structures (phonological change). Sound change can consist of the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by another, the complete loss of the affected sound, or even the introduction of a new sound in a place where there had been none. Sound changes can be environmentally conditioned, meaning that the change only occurs in a defined sound environment, whereas in other environments the same speech sound is not affected by the change. The term "sound change" refers to diachronic changes—that is, irreversible changes in a language's sound system over time; "alternation", on the other hand, refers to changes that happen synchronically (i.e. within the language of an individual speaker, depending on the neighboring sounds) and which do not change the language's underlying system (for example, the -s in the English plural can be pronounced differently depending on what sound it follows; this is a form of alternation, rather than sound change). However, since "sound change" can refer to the historical introduction of an alternation (such as post-vocalic /k/ in Tuscan—once [k], but now [h])—the label is inherently imprecise and often must be clarified as referring to phonetic change or restructuring.

Whistled Language is the use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication. A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent whistlers to transmit and comprehend a potentially unlimited number of messages over long distances. Whistled languages are different in this respect from the restricted codes sometimes used by herders or animal trainers to transmit simple messages or instructions. Generally, whistled languages emulate the tones or vowel formants of a natural spoken language, as well as aspects of its intonation and prosody, so that trained listeners who speak that language can understand the encoded message. Whistled language is rare compared to spoken language, but it is found in cultures around the world. It is especially common in tone languages where the whistled tones transmit the tones of the syllables (tone melodies of the words). This might be because in tone languages the tone melody carries more of the functional load of communication while non-tonal phonology carries proportionally less. The genesis of a whistled language has never been recorded in either case and has not yet received much productive study. Musical Language - Speech Recognition.

Human whistled languages may offer model for how to study dolphin communication. More than 80 cultures employ a whistled form of their native language to communicate over long distances. Whistled human speech mostly evolved in places where people live in rugged terrain, such as mountains or dense forest, because the sounds carry much farther than ordinary speech or even shouting. While these whistled languages vary by region and culture, the basic principle is the same: People simplify words, syllable by syllable, into whistled melodies. Trained whistlers can understand an amazing amount of information. In whistled Turkish, for example, common whistled sentences are understood up to 90 percent of the time. This ability to extract meaning from whistled speech has attracted linguists and other researchers interested in investigating the intricacies of how the human brain processes and even creates language. While humans and dolphins produce sounds and convey information differently, the structure and attributes found across human whistle languages may provide insights as to how bottlenose dolphins encode complex information.

Sound Symbolism

Sound Symbolism is the idea that vocal sounds or phonemes carry meaning in and of themselves.

Onomatopoeia is a word that phonetically imitates, suggests or resembles the sound that it describes. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as "oink", "meow" (or "miaow"), "roar" and "chirp". Onomatopoeia can differ between languages: it conforms to some extent to the broader linguistic system; hence the sound of a clock may be expressed as "tick tock" in English, "tic tac" in Spanish and Italian (shown in the picture), "dī dā" in Mandarin, "katchin katchin" in Japanese, or "tik-tik" in Hindi. The term onomatopoeia means 'the imitation of a sound'. Sound Shapes - Symbols.

Self-Reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philosophy, it also refers to the ability of a subject to speak of or refer to itself, that is, to have the kind of thought expressed by the first person nominative singular pronoun "I" in English.

Recursion occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics and computer science, where a function being defined is applied within its own definition. While this apparently defines an infinite number of instances (function values), it is often done in such a way that no infinite loop or infinite chain of references can occur. Fractals.

Reading Comprehension

Comprehension is the ability to accurately read text and symbols, and to accurately process the information, and to accurately understand the meaning of information in different contexts.

Comprehend is to get the meaning of something. To become aware of through the senses. Include in scope; include as part of something broader; have as one's sphere or territory. - PDF.

Reading to Learn - Active Listening - Generation Effect - Memory Techniques - Memory Cues - Critical Thinking - Analyzing - Context - Decipher - Intelligence - Speed Reading - Literacy

Intelligible is something that is capable of being apprehended or understood and something that is well articulated or enunciated, and loud enough to be heard distinctly, or written clear enough so as to be understood. Readability.

Familiar is something well known or easily recognized and within normal everyday experience. Something common and ordinary and not strange. To be well informed about something or to know something thoroughly.

Perusing is to examine something very carefully and to consider something with attention to detail. Reading carefully with intent to remember.

Meaning is the message that is intended or expressed or signified. Rich in significance or implication. Have in mind as a purpose.

Coherence in linguistics is what makes a text semantically meaningful. Text-based features that provide cohesion in a text do not necessarily help achieve coherence, that is, they do not always contribute to the meaningfulness of a text, be it written or spoken. A text coheres best if the world around it is also coherent.

Coherent is something with an orderly, logical, and aesthetically consistent relation of parts. Being capable of thinking and expressing yourself in a clear and consistent manner. Coherent also means sticking together.

Cohesion is the grammatical and lexical linking within a text or sentence that holds a text together and gives it meaning.

Critical Reading does not take the given text at face value, but involves a deeper examination of the claims put forth as well as the supporting points and possible counterarguments. Assumptions.

Critical Literacy encourages readers to actively analyze texts and offers strategies for what proponents describe as uncovering underlying messages.

Deconstruction is a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning. Deconstruct.

Close Reading describes, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by close attention to individual words, the syntax, and the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as the reader scans the line of text. Read to Learn.

Read Between the Lines is to look for meaning or to discover a meaning that is hidden or implied rather than explicitly stated. To understand what someone is really feeling or implying from what they say or write when they haven't openly stated the truth. To understand what someone really means, or what is really happening in a situation, even though it is not said openly. To see the whole picture.

Reading comprehension test scores are almost useless if the student never reads anything worth comprehending. The same goes for math scores, if you don't count the things that matter, then knowing how to count wont matter.

Principle of Compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine them. The principle of compositionality states that in a meaningful sentence, if the lexical parts are taken out of the sentence, what remains will be the rules of composition. It is frequently taken to mean that every operation of the syntax should be associated with an operation of the semantics that acts on the meanings of the constituents combined by the syntactic operation.

Three-Cueing is when students rely on the context and the sentence structure to identify words they don't know.

Reading for memorization is best when the reading speed is fewer than 100 words per minute wpm. Reading for learning is best when the reading speed is 100 to 200 wpm. Reading for comprehension is best when the reading speed is 200 to 400 wpm. Speed reading or Skimming is around 400 to 700 wpm. The average adult reads prose text around 150 to 300 wpm. People talk or speak at around 180 wpm, and people hear words around 150–160 wpm.

Intensive Reading is a slow and careful reading of a small amount of difficult text. This is an activity that requires great mental effort and focus. Reading short texts thoroughly and with clear goals, such as to answer reading comprehension questions or to identify how sentences are linked. To read intensively is to completely deconstruct a text, with the goal of absorbing as much meaning from it as possible. This is done by taking a text, and systematically looking up every word, phrase, or collocation that you do not understand. Intensive reading involves learners reading in detail with specific learning aims and tasks. Slow reading is the intentional reduction in the speed of reading, carried out to increase comprehension or pleasure. Deep reading is mostly beneficial when you're reading something valuable, especially something that increases your knowledge and understanding.

Extensive Reading - Speed Reading - Books

Read with Purpose. Skim first and high light the things that are important or of interest, and take notes. Learn reading mechanics and think in pictures. Rehearse as you go along. Stay within your attention span and work to increase that span. Rehearse again soon. Impression, Association, Repetition.

Context Principle is a form of semantic holism holding that a philosopher should "never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition".

Semantic Holism is a theory in the philosophy of language to the effect that a certain part of language, be it a term or a complete sentence, can only be understood through its relations to a (previously understood) larger segment of language.

Componential Analysis is the analysis of words through structured sets of semantic features, which are given as "present", "absent" or "indifferent with reference to feature".

Structural Linguistics involves collecting a corpus of utterances and then attempting to classify all of the elements of the corpus at their different linguistic levels: the phonemes, morphemes, lexical categories, noun phrases, verb phrases, and sentence types.

Using mechanical tools improves our language skills, study finds. Our ability to understand the syntax of complex sentences is one of the most difficult language skills to acquire. Research has revealed a correlation between being particularly proficient in tool use and having good syntactic ability. A new study has now shown that both skills rely on the same neurological resources, which are located in the same brain region. Furthermore, motor training using a tool improves our ability to understand the syntax of complex sentences and -- vice-versa -- syntactic training improves our proficiency in using tools.

Complex Sentence contains at least one independent clause and at least one dependent clause. Dependent clauses can refer to the subject (who, which) the sequence/time (since, while), or the causal elements (because, if) of the independent clause. Analogies - Ambiguity.

Independent Clause is a group of words that contains a subject and verb and expresses a complete thought. Independent Clause is a clause that can stand by itself as a simple sentence. An independent clause contains a subject and a predicate and makes sense by itself. Independent clauses can be joined by using a semicolon or by using a comma followed by a coordinating conjunction (and, but, for, or, nor, so, yet, etc.).

Dependent Clause is a group of words that contains a subject and verb but does not express a complete thought. A dependent clause cannot be a sentence. Often a dependent clause is marked by a dependent marker word. embedded clause is a clause that is embedded within a complex sentence. For instance, in the English sentence "I know that Bette is a dolphin", the clause "that Bette is a dolphin" occurs as the complement of the verb "know" rather than as a freestanding sentence. Subtypes of dependent clauses include content clauses, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses. Context.

Complex Syntax was defined broadly in this investigation as an utterance that included two or more clauses or an utterance that included a subordinate clause but did not include the main clause (e.g. a single clause preceded by a subordinate conjunction or a noun modified by a relative clause).

Syntax the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language. syntax in linguistics is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning. There are numerous approaches to syntax which differ in their central assumptions and goals.

Fluency is the property of a person or of a system that delivers information quickly and with expertise, often used in conjunction with accuracy and complexity, their speed and coherency of language use, or the length and rate of their speech output. Reading fluency refers to the link between the recognition of words while reading and reading comprehension, which manifests itself in the speed and accuracy that one is able to read text. Research on reading fluency aligns concepts of accuracy, automaticity, and prosody. To achieve reading fluency, readers must have knowledge of the content of the language as well as the vocabulary being used. Interventions designed to help children learn to read fluently generally include some form of repeated reading, but this process may differ for children with learning disabilities, who may struggle with reading fluency. Oral fluency or speaking fluency is a measurement both of production and reception of speech, as a fluent speaker must be able to understand and respond to others in conversation. Spoken language is typically characterized by seemingly non-fluent qualities (e.g., fragmentation, pauses, false starts, hesitation, repetition) because of ‘task stress.’ How orally fluent one is can therefore be understood in terms of perception, and whether these qualities of speech can be perceived as expected and natural (i.e., fluent) or unusual and problematic (i.e., non-fluent). Oral reading fluency is sometimes distinguished from oral fluency. Oral reading fluency refers to the ability to read words accurately and quickly while using good vocal expression and phrasing. Oral reading fluency is often linked to Schreiber’s Theory of Prosody, which places importance on the tone, rhythm, and expressiveness of speech. Written or compositional fluency can be measured in a variety of ways. Researchers have measured by length of the composition (especially under timed conditions), words produced per minute, sentence length, or words per clause. Ratio measures (e.g., words per clause, words per sentence, and words per error-free sentence) have historically been most valid and reliable. Pronunciation.

The two most important skills to have when reading are. First, you need excellent reading comprehension skills, which is to understand the meaning of words and the context that surrounds the words. Then the second most important skills to have is a higher level of information processing, which is knowing the accuracy of the message, the relevance of the message, knowing why the message was created and who created it, and you need to know the reason why you are reading this message, which could be for work, or for personal preference, or something random that you just happen to read. This higher level of abstraction needs for you to be totally aware of what you're reading.

To help remember what you read, you need to experience what you are reading and enjoy the experience. Feel what you're reading, visualize what you're reading, hear it, taste it, smell it. Be immersed in what you're reading and let the text transport you to another place and time.

If you don't read the things that matter, or fully understand the things that you're reading, then knowing how to read will never benefit you as much as it can. So you have to learn how to use reading effectively and efficiently in order to receive all the benefits. Otherwise you will miss out on an amazing opportunity to reach your full potential. If something that your reading is not increasing your understanding of yourself and the world around you, then why are you reading it? Reading should provide you with continuous development and progress, if not, then you are definitely not reading anything important or valuable.

Learning to Read between the Lines. Context.

Complex, unfamiliar sentences make the brain's language network work harder. Sentences with greater linguistic complexity are most likely to fire up a key brain language processing center, according to a study that employed an artificial language network. The new study reveals that sentences that are more complex, either because of unusual grammar or unexpected meaning, generate stronger responses in these language processing centers. Sentences that are very straightforward barely engage these regions, and nonsensical sequences of words don't do much for them either.

Busy pictures hinder reading ability in children. Extraneous images draw attention from text, reducing comprehension in beginning readers.

Zoom in to focus on what you are reading and then expand outward to see the whole picture.
You need to process information on several layers or levels. You start off reading, you understand the meaning of the word, then the meaning of the sentence, then the meaning of the paragraph, then the meaning of the chapter, then the meaning of the subject, then how it relates to a area of knowledge, then processing what you have read, then understanding what you have read, then confirming if the information is accurate, then confirming if the information is relevant or important, then knowing how you will categorize this information, then knowing how you will remember this information, good or bad? This can be done in about few seconds, and not always in the exact same order, sometimes you need to understand the sentence first before understanding the meaning of the word. Visualize the sentence as you read. Identify relationships between words in sentences using knowledge of the individual words and linking known meanings together in a way that can be used to learn new information.

There are many layers of information. When you hear a word or read a word, you are processing a lot more than a word or a sentence. The meaning of a word has other words that define that word, which means that those words have other words that define those words. And all words have interpretations, and all words are processed a little differently, depending on the knowledge and the experiences of the reciever.

Reading without comprehension is like eating food but still being malnourished. You're not starving to death, but you're also not able to live up to your full potential, or develop normally. Yes you can read, but you can't fully understand what is written, because the message goes beyond the words that are written. And it's not just the words, it's all the other things that the original words do not express. You have to see the whole picture. This is the one flaws of writing, the clarity and meaning can not be confirmed when the writer is not there to explain what is written. But now that writing is digital, and connected, we can link to more information when needed. So things can be explained, giving more insight and better understanding. Reading with links can help improve comprehension, but the goal is to be able not to have to click on the links at all, meaning that you know what that information is, and you can see beyond what is written. I Comprehend.

Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text.

Documentation Writing Standards - Articulation

Legibility is the ease with which a reader can recognize individual characters in text.

Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test are readability tests designed to indicate how difficult a reading passage in English is to understand.

Neuroscience of Text Comprehension

Intertextuality shaping of a text's meaning by another text. Intertextuality is a literary device that creates an ‘interrelationship between texts’ and generates related understanding in separate works.

Web Literacy comprises the skills and competencies needed for reading, writing and participating on the web. It has been described as "both content and activity"

Information Literacy - Media Literacy - Scientific Literacy - Meaning - Labels - Book Report - Essay - Thesis

It's Greek to Me is an idiom expressing that something is difficult to understand. The idiom is typically used with respect to something of a foreign nature.

Interpret - Deep Learning - Listening - Awareness - Understanding - Processing - Learning Methods - Memory

Learning Words from Contextual Clues (PDF)

How to Underline or Highlight a Reading: Study begins when you decide what you will learn. When you underline, you decide what you will learn. If you underline accurately, you will be able to review and make notes more easily. Guides for underlining or High Lighting.
A. Read an entire section first.
B. Do not underline too much.
C. Select information you want to learn to make into notes.
D. Make major points stand out clearly. Use numbers. Use double underlining. Use stars.
E. Make margin notes. Use key words. Use brief summaries.
Make questions if you do not understand, so that you can return to that section.
F. Realize that introductions rarely contain material that needs to be underlined.
G. Turn major headings and sub-headings into questions. Underline the condensed answer. Answers may include information in: Topic sentences. Words printed in special type. Numbered lists. Pay attention to and be aware of words of transition, introduction, conclusion, and definition (in other words, accordingly, since, then, of course, but, yet, more important, likewise, besides, for these reasons, subsequently, afterwards, that is, that means, etc.) Should see major facts in an outline form.
H. Use brackets when several lines are important to underline.
I. Use numbers when a series of ideas are important.
J. Make a question mark beside unclear sections of information.
K. Write down questions in your notebook for class that you have for the Professor.

What is the Difference in the Reading Assessment between Comprehension and Interpretation?

You need to do more then just read, you need to do some research. Just reading is for idiots who don't know any better. You read to learn. If what you're reading doesn't provide you with enough information to fully understand the value of the words you just read, then you have to seek out more information and do some research, other wise you learn very little about everything. And the sad part is, you don't even know your lacking key information and knowledge.

Measure and Assess. You have to make sure that your reading comprehension is improving every year and make sure that you are increasing your vocabulary as well. Functional Literacy may be adequate, but you still need to fully understand what you are reading and read the things that matter, things that will increase your understanding of yourself and the world around you.

Testing (types) - Reading Assessment (PDF) - Word Identification Assessment (PDF)

Functional illiteracy is reading and writing skills that are inadequate "to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level". Functional illiteracy is contrasted with illiteracy in the strict sense, meaning the inability to read or write simple sentences in any language. Foreigners who cannot read and write in the native language where they live may also be considered functionally illiterate.

Motor Cortex Influences Word Comprehension. Comprehension of a word’s meaning involves not only the ‘classic’ language brain centres but also the cortical regions responsible for the control of body muscles, such as hand movements. The resulting brain representations are, therefore, distributed across a network of locations involving both areas specialized for language processing and those responsible for the control of the associated action.

Two different regions of the brain are critical to integrating semantic information while reading, which could shed more light on why people with aphasia have difficulty with semantics, according to new research. Language depends largely on the integration of vocabulary across multiple words to derive semantic concepts, including reference to events and objects, and statements of truth. However, the way people integrate semantic information while reading remains undetermined. They found that different areas of the language network showed sensitivity to meaning across a small window of rapidly cascading activity. Specifically, they discovered the existence of complementary cortical mosaics for semantic integration in two areas: the posterior temporal cortex and the inferior frontal cortex. The posterior temporal cortex is activated early on in the semantic integration process, while the inferior frontal cortex is particularly sensitive to all aspects of meaning, especially in deep sulcal sites, or grooves in the folds of the brain.

Aphasia is a disorder that affects a person's ability to express and understand written and spoken language. A person may be unable to comprehend or unable to formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. It can occur suddenly after a stroke or head injury, or develop slowly from a growing brain tumor or disease.

"If you don't Remember, Comprehend or Learn what you read, then your reading speed does not matter." Ignorance.

If you don't comprehend the things that matter then good reading comprehension doesn't matter. So reading comprehension tests must be about comprehending important information and knowledge, otherwise good reading comprehension is almost useless. So the first reading comprehension tests should include the actual skills that are needed for good comprehension.

Increasing the size of spacing between certain words could improve people’s reading comprehension

Chunking in writing (presentation)

You have to understand the definitions of words. But more importantly, you have to understand the meaning of words when they are used together with other words. Words can be misleading, you have to pay attention and learn how words can be used to deceive.

"Having good reading comprehension is great, but if you never read anything important or valuable, then it's almost useless."

"The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple. The teaching of your word gives light, so even the simple can understand."

You're not going to remember all the details of everything you read, especially when you're not interested in the information or interested in the subject. And you don't want to force students to remember useless details just so they can pass a test. You want students to comprehend what they read only when it's important. Being able to Pay Attention to details is one thing, but knowing when to pay attention, and do it effectively, is the most important aspect of reading comprehension.

Speech-language experts can help kids who struggle to read and write. RAP stands for read a paragraph, ask questions about the main idea and details, and put main ideas and details into your own words. Other successful strategies include: Graphically organizing information into visual maps using a pencil or sticky note to mark confusing, important or surprising portions of a text with specific symbols (?, * or !, for example) Underlining or circling key words and phrases that the reader doesn’t understand and/or that occur repeatedly in a text writing a very brief summary of each paragraph or section in the margin of the text or on a sticky note.

Eprcontent.k12
Practice Reading
Reading Comprehension
Reading Assessment (Ehow)
Wrights Law
Reading Key
Reading Soft
RHL School
Oral Reading Fluency

Practice Reading Tests

New Readability - Reading Standards (PDF) - Core Standards - PDF's

Northwest Evaluation Association - Jim Wright (PDF)

Word Knowledge - Memory - Writing Skills - Child Development Info

Mechanics of Reading  -  Skillful Reading Techniques: In order to read at a good speed, it is good to keep in mind. A minimum number of fixations to the line of type. Wide eye span which encompass phrases and thought sequence rather than isolated words. A complete absence of lip movements and vocalization. Infrequent regressions.

Eye Movements: Move the eyes consistently forward, regularly, and rhythmically-- pick up groups of words rather than isolated words. Practice quick and rhythmic return from the end of the line to the beginning of the next. Practice looking down quickly at a line of print, lifting your eyes, and checking to see how many words you saw in this fixation. Do this until you are actually aware of a broadened span. Cover the print of a single line with a plain white card. By moving the card downward, expose the line, cover it up, expose it, cover it up, etc. Do this until you are aware of seeing more words at a glance. Practice reading a column of newsprint, restricting yourself to only two fixations per line. Keep in mind that the length of fixation and span is determined by the type of material you are reading. Watch for signs of fatigue: twitching muscles, burning sensations in the eyelids, fading, or blurring of print. Look away from your reading often and give momentary rest to your eyes.

Vocalization: Place the forefinger on your lips and your thumb and other fingers on your larynx. Practice reading with your mouth tightly closed; attempt to restrict movement of the larynx, tongue, and lips. Check to see whether you are actually "hearing" words as you read; this is another form of vocalization which can be eliminated only through determination to use only your eyes and the meaning centers of your brain.

Regressions: Regressions often occur because you are attempting to take such long spans that you miss essential words and relationships. If this is noticeable in your reading, shorten the span. Practice covering all of the material which you have just read with a plain card. This will not permit you to regress and will force you to concentrate on essential words and essential relationships in the sentence or paragraph. Read so fast, in easy materials, that there is no time for regressions. Recognize the fact, at all times, that some regression is necessary to establish relationships within the selection which you are reading.

Reading Comprehension Assessment

Formal Assessment is reading passages followed by questions about the passage.

Informal Assessments is to ask students to tell you about what they read or retell the story or event in their own words.

Informal Reading Inventory is an individually-administered diagnostic tool that assesses a student's reading comprehension and reading accuracy. The IRI measures three reading levels: independent, instructional and frustrational. Concepts of print. Rhyming. Identifying initial sounds. Blending words. Phoneme segmentation. Phoneme manipulation. Phoneme deletion.

A reader should not just understand the basic message, but also see the big picture, and know how to apply this information to future learning moments.

Decoding Skill is measured through the child’s ability to read words out of context. Isolated words are presented to the child one at a time, and the child is asked to say the word aloud (this is not a vocabulary test, so children should not be expected to provide meanings for the word). The words selected for a decoding test should be words that are within the child’s spoken vocabulary, and should contain a mix of phonetically regular and phonetically irregular words.

Because vocabulary knowledge is essential to reading comprehension, a person should always be learning new words, but more importantly, learn how to effectively use words.

Text comprehension builds on vocabulary knowledge by allowing the reader to combine the meanings of the individual words to understand the overall text

Language Comprehension can be assessed in basically the same way reading comprehension is assessed. With language comprehension assessment, however, the child should not be expected to read any text. Everything from the instructions to the comprehension questions should be presented verbally to the child.

Linguistic Knowledge is the synthesis of three more basic cognitive elements -- phonology, semantics, and syntax.

Phonology involves discriminating between two words that sound similar.

Semantics is a general term that just refers to "meaning." Vocabulary specifically refers to the meaning of isolated words, and morphology specifically refers to the meaning of word parts, but semantics can generally be applied to the meaning of word parts, whole words, sentences and discourse.

Phoneme Awareness is understanding that words are made up of sounds (linguists call this a "metalinguistic" skill), while phoneme awareness tests are tests which reflect the child's specific knowledge that words are made up of phonemes.

Syntax Assessment involves presenting the child with sentences which have one word omitted, and asking the child to suggest words that could fill the blanks.  This involves the child’s ability to combine simple sentences into complex sentences, and to add modifiers appropriately.

Cipher Knowledge Assessment is to test a child’s ability to sound out regular words is to ask them to name isolated (out of context) words that they are not familiar with. This insures that they are decoding them, and not just recognizing them or guessing based on contextual cues.

Lexical Knowledge Assessment happens when a child learns to sound out words; then the child learns that when certain words are sounded out, they do not make sense.

Alphabetic Principle is to ask the child to write words that you dictate.

Letter Knowledge is the knowledge of the letters and understanding of the mechanics of text.

One indicator that a student is struggling with reading comprehension is difficulty reading aloud. If a student struggles to recognize or sound out words when he’s reading orally, he’s likely encountering the same struggles when reading silently. Weak vocabulary is another indicator of poor reading comprehension. This is because students who struggle with text comprehension may have difficulty learning and incorporating new vocabulary. poor spelling and weak writing skills may be a signal that a student isn’t able to comprehend what he’s reading. Difficulty spelling may indicate problems remembering letter sounds, which means that the student is likely also having trouble processing text.

Reading Assessment

How do you accurately measure, assess and test someone's reading ability, and writing ability? Knowing how to read is very important for learning. You can learn many things from reading, without having to depend on someone else reading for you. You can learn knowledge from other people, you can learn to communicate, and you can acquire important information and facts about yourself and the world around you. Reading is the path to intelligence.

Testing - Read to Learn

"Words are a vehicle to transmit information to the Brain"

"Reading Enriches the Mind"

"Learning to communicate is for our survival and for our universal well being."

"A majority of the worlds most important information is communicated using words."

"An Intelligent speaker, a powerful talker and those who can influence others through speech, will always be heard more than the best writers. But reading good writing and listening to good speakers are both equally important, because in order to be a good speaker, you have to read good writing. Sustained Silent Reading is only one half of the skills needed to Communicate effectively."

Dyslexia - Reading Difficulties

Dyslexia is having trouble with reading despite normal intelligence. Difficulties include spelling words, reading quickly, writing words, "sounding out" words in the head, pronouncing words when reading aloud and understanding what one reads. Dyslexia.

Neural Changes following Remediation in Adult Developmental Dyslexia.

Sensitivity to dynamic auditory and visual stimuli predicts nonword reading ability in both dyslexic and normal readers.

Nonword is a group of letters or speech sounds that looks or sounds like a word but that is not accepted as such by native speakers. Nonword reading ability is the ability to read unfamiliar words that are pronounceable but have no meaning. It's a key indicator of a student's basic phonics and alphabetic principle. Nonword reading ability is important for learning to read because it allows children to use their large spoken vocabulary to learn new words.

Language-Based Learning Disability are neurological differences that can affect skills such as listening, reasoning, speaking, reading, writing, and maths calculations. It is also associated with movement, coordination, and direct attention.

Dyslexia Typeface (youtube)

Book Share - Text to Speech Tools - Speech - Audio Books - Phonics - Hearing Impaired - Deafness - Reading Difficulties

The Brain can be Trained to Avoid Dyslexia, study suggests. The ability of the brain to synchronize with the tone and intonation of speech influences how language is processed. Auditory regions of the brain synchronize with external auditory stimuli. That is to say, the brain is able to naturally adjust the frequency of its brain waves with the oscillations or the rhythm of what it listens at each moment.

Dysgraphia (writing difficulties) - Dyscalculia (math difficulties) - Learning Disabilities - Brain Injuries

Neuroimaging reveals hidden communication between brain layers during reading. Language involves many different regions of the brain. Researchers have discovered previously hidden connections between brain layers during reading, in a neuroimaging study. The team used laminar Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (lfMRI) to investigate what happens when people read Dutch words like ''zalm'' (salmon) compared to pseudowords (''rorf''), revealing top-down influences on deep brain layers for the first time. When people read a word, they combine 'bottom-up' (lower level) visual information to recognise the letters, and 'top-down' (higher level) cognitive information to recognise the word and retrieve its meaning from memory. Such top-down and bottom-up information streams are notoriously difficult to measure noninvasively (without having to open up the brain).

Humans are born with brains 'prewired' to see words. Study finds connections to language areas of the brain. Humans are born with a part of the brain that is prewired to be receptive to seeing words and letters, setting the stage at birth for people to learn how to read. Analyzing brain scans of newborns, researchers found that this part of the brain -- called the 'visual word form area' (VWFA) -- is connected to the language network of the brain.

Visual Word Form Area is a functional region of the left fusiform gyrus and surrounding cortex (right-hand side being part of the fusiform face area) that is hypothesized to be involved in identifying words and letters from lower-level shape images, prior to association with phonology or semantics. Because the alphabet is relatively new in human evolution, it is unlikely that this region developed as a result of selection pressures related to word recognition per se; however, this region may be highly specialized for certain types of shapes that occur naturally in the environment and are therefore likely to surface within written language. In addition to word recognition, the VWFA may participate in higher-level processing of word meaning. Anomalies in the activation of this region have been linked to reading disorders. If the area is subjected to a surgical lesion, the patient will suffer a clear impairment to reading ability but not to recognition of objects, names, or faces or to general language abilities. There will be some improvement over the next six months, but reading will still take twice as long as it had before surgery. Electrical brain stimulation to the VWFA causes reading-specific disruptions and can cause letter misperception. Strokes.

Fusiform Gyrus is part of the temporal lobe and occipital lobe in Brodmann area 37. The fusiform gyrus is located between the lingual gyrus and parahippocampal gyrus above, and the inferior temporal gyrus below. Though the functionality of the fusiform gyrus is not fully understood, it has been linked with various neural pathways related to recognition. Additionally, it has been linked to various neurological phenomena such as synesthesia, dyslexia, and prosopagnosia. Mid-fusiform sulcus is a shallow sulcus that divides the fusiform gyrus into lateral and medial partitions. Functionally, the MFS divides both large-scale functional maps and identifies fine-scale functional regions such as the anterior portion of the fusiform face area.

Gene study identifies series of DNA variants linked to dyslexia. Scientists have for the first time pinpointed a large number of genes that are reliably associated with dyslexia. Around a third of the 42 genetic variants identified have been previously linked to general cognitive ability and educational attainment. The researchers say their findings aid our understanding of the biology behind why some children struggle to read or spell.

Learning to Read in your thirties profoundly transforms brain networks. Only a few months of reading training can modify the thalamus fundamentally. These deep structures in the thalamus and brainstem help our visual cortex to filter important information from the flood of visual input even before we consciously perceive it. It seems that the more the signal timings between the two brain regions are aligned, the better the reading capabilities. Therefore it is believed that these brain systems increasingly fine-tune their communication as learners become more and more proficient in reading and why experienced readers navigate more efficiently through a text. Brain Plasticity.

Book helps identify risks of reading difficulties in preschoolers. New screening tool that directly engages preschool-age children during clinic visits to assess their early literacy skills. The tool has the potential to identify reading difficulties as early as possible, target interventions and empower families to help their child at home, according to researchers. The children completed standardized assessments of important literacy skills: composite, vocabulary, rhyming and rapid automatized naming (how quickly they can access linguistic information about objects, letters or words). We found significantly thicker gray matter cortex in the left-sided areas of the brain in children with higher TRH scores, which align with cortical thickness patterns found in older children and adults with higher reading skills. Concepts of Print, Onset Sounds, Letter Names, Letter Sounds, Word Rhyming, Word Blending, Word Segmenting, Sight Word Reading, Decodable Word Reading, Nonsense Word Reading- Sentence Reading, Oral Language (Sentence Repetition).

Not every reader's struggle is the same. Neuroscientists find that brain signatures of reading difficulties in students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are, on average, different from those of students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds who struggle with reading. These differences suggest that different types of interventions may needed for different groups of children, the researchers say. The study also highlights the importance of including a wide range of SES levels in studies of reading or other types of academic learning.

Composite Score is the average of your four test scores, rounded to the nearest whole number. Fractions less than one-half are rounded down; fractions one-half or more are rounded up.

Scientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston have now identified a crucial region in the temporal lobe, know as the mid-fusiform cortex, which appears to act as the brain's visual dictionary. if we temporarily disrupt activity in the mid-fusiform cortex using briefly applied electrical pulses, it causes a temporary inability to read, a dyslexia, but doesn't disrupt other language functions like naming visual objects or understanding speech.

Extra spacing can boost children’s reading speed. New study finds significant benefits for both dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. A new study has found that a child's reading speed can be improved by simply increasing the space between letters within a piece of text. The study discovered that text with increased space between each letter provided a benefit to both dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. On average, the dyslexia group showed a 13% increase in reading speed, while the comparison group of non-dyslexic children showed a 5% increase in reading speed.

Online program to support children with reading difficulties helped them make significant progress. Own-Voice Intensive Phonics or OVIP approach is a computer-assisted instruction system which has already been shown to be effective as part of face-to-face tuition as part of previous research. The OVIP method involves pupils reading the text of the lesson out loud in response to the teacher or teaching assistant's prompts, and the pupil's speech is audio-recorded until it is read without error. The pupil then listens to the audio recording of his/her own voice, reading the text, writing the words heard and creating an error-free written record of the lesson with support and checking by the teacher/ TA. The pupil later repeats the second step independently, ideally three additional times, writing the lesson in response to the audio recording, then checking the accuracy of the new written lesson against the original written record.

Developmental dyslexia essential to human adaptive success. Cambridge researchers studying cognition, behavior and the brain have concluded that people with developmental dyslexia have specific strengths and are specialised to explore the unknown. This is likely to play a fundamental role in human adaptation to changing environments.

Reading Fast - Speed Reading

Words Per Minute is a common metric for assessing reading speed. Research done in 2012 measured the speed at which subjects read a text aloud, and found the average speed across 17 different languages to be 184 wpm ±29 or 863 characters per minute ±234. However, for the languages that use the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets, the number of wpm varied, as low as 161±18 for Finnish and as high as 228±30 for English. The reason for this is different word structures in each language (longer words in such languages as Finnish and shorter words in English). However, the number of characters per minute tends to be around 1000 for all the tested languages. For the tested Asian languages that use particular writing systems (Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese) these numbers are lower. Scientific studies have demonstrated that reading—defined here as capturing and decoding all the words on every page—faster than 900 wpm is not feasible given the limits set by the anatomy of the eye. While proofreading materials, people are able to read English at 200 WPM on paper, and 180 wpm on a monitor. Sign Language has a signing speed of 110-130 wpm.

Audiobooks are recommended to be 150–160 words per minute, which is the range that people comfortably hear and vocalize words. A measure of words processed in a minute, can also be used as a measurement of the speed of typing or Morse code sending and receiving. Since the length or duration of words is clearly variable, for the purpose of such measurement, the definition of each word is often standardized to be five characters or keystrokes long in English, including spaces and punctuation. For example, under such a method applied to plain English text the phrase "I run" counts as one word, but "rhinoceros" and "let's talk" would both count as two. The average adult reading speed is between 200 and 300 words per minute (same reading rate you want to achieve by the 6th grade). For success in college you should be able to read 350 to 450 words per minute. Most all languages have an average information rate of about 39 bits per second. This means that no matter how fast or slow a language is spoken, it conveys information at roughly the same speed, about twice the speed of Morse code. People speak about 140 words per minute. A fast speaker will get to 170 words per minute, a slow speaker will use around 110 words.

Focus - Comprehension - Filtering - Scan and Scroll

Speed Reading is any of several techniques used to improve one's ability to read quickly. Speed reading methods include chunking and minimizing subvocalization.

Speed Listening - Speed Writing - Typing Speed

Eye Movement in music reading is the scanning of a musical score by a musician's eyes. This usually occurs as the music is read during performance, although musicians sometimes scan music silently to study it.

Frames Per Second - Gaze Detection - Eye Tracking

Reading Speed Benefits from Increased Vertical Word Spacing in Normal Peripheral Vision. Crowding, the adverse spatial interaction due to proximity of adjacent targets, has been suggested as an explanation for slow reading in peripheral vision. Reading speed increased with vertical word spacing up to about 1.2× to 1.5× the standard spacing and remained constant and similar to the unflanked reading speed at larger vertical word spacings. In the periphery, reading speed also increased with vertical word spacing, but it remained below the unflanked reading speed for all spacings tested. At 2× the standard spacing, peripheral reading speed was still about 25% lower than the unflanked reading speed for both eccentricities and print sizes. Results from a control experiment showed that the greater reliance of peripheral reading speed on vertical word spacing was also found in the right visual field. Uppercase Lowercase.

Reading speed can be increased by changing the font style to the readers preference. 

Visual Field - Readability - Perspective

Saccade is a quick, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two or more phases of fixation in the same direction. Saccade movements are very fast jumps from one eye position to another whereas in smooth pursuit movements, eyes move smoothly instead of in jumps. Saccades are one of the fastest movements produced by the human body (blinks may reach even higher peak velocities). The peak angular speed of the eye during a saccade reaches up to 900°/s in humans. Humans and many animals do not look at a scene in fixed steadiness; instead, the eyes move around, locating interesting parts of the scene and building up a mental, three-dimensional 'map' corresponding to the scene. Sustained Silent Reading (wiki)

Eye Movement in reading involves the visual processing of written text. Eyes do not move continuously along a line of text, but make short, rapid movements (saccades) intermingled with short stops (fixations).

Subvocalization or silent speech, is the internal speech typically made when reading; it provides the sound of the word as it is read.

Skimming is a process of speed reading that involves visually searching the sentences of a page for clues to meaning. Skimming alone may not be ideal when complete comprehension of the text is the main objective. Skimming is mainly used when researching and getting an overall idea of the text. When time is limited, skimming or skipping over text can aid comprehension when layered reading is employed. When reading an essay, it can mean reading the beginning and ending for summary information, then optionally the first sentence of each paragraph to quickly determine whether to seek still more detail, as determined by the questions or purpose of the reading. For some people, this comes naturally, but is usually acquired by practice. Skimming is usually seen more in adults than in children. It is conducted at a higher rate (700 words per minute and above) than normal reading for comprehension (around 200–230 wpm), and results in lower comprehension rates, especially with information-rich reading material. Scanning is the process where one actively looks for information using a mind-map (organizing information in a visually hierarchical manner that showcases the interrelatedness of the information for better retrievability) formed from skimming. These techniques are used by meta-guiding your eyes, which is the visual guiding of the eye using a finger or pointer, such as a pen, in order for the eye to move faster along the length of a passage of text.

There are 3 types of Reading: Mental Reading or Subvocalization: Sounding out each word internally, as reading to yourself. This is the slowest form of reading. Mental readers generally read at approximately 250 words per minute. Auditory Reading: hearing out the read words. This is a faster process. Auditory Readers read at approximately 450 words per minute. Visual Reading is understanding the meaning of the word, rather than sounding or hearing. This is the fastest process. Visual readers read at approximately 700 words per minute.

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation is an experimental model frequently used to examine the temporal characteristics of attention. The RSVP paradigm requires participants to look at a continuous presentation of visual items which is around 10 items per second. They are all shown in the same place. The targets are placed inside this stream of continuous items. They are separate from the rest of the items known as distracters. The distracters can either be a color change or it can be letters that are among the numbers.

Steady State Visually Evoked Potential are signals that are natural responses to visual stimulation at specific frequencies. When the retina is excited by a visual stimulus ranging from 3.5 Hz to 75 Hz, the brain generates electrical activity at the same (or multiples of) frequency of the visual stimulus.

Frequency recognition based on canonical correlation analysis for SSVEP-based BCIs.

Visual Processing Speed can be defined as the amount of time needed to make a correct judgment about a visual stimulus. These responses can be made with reference to many types of visual tasks. Response Times - Processing Speeds.

Howard Berg - describes techniques to read faster and more efficiently - theDove.us (youtube) - How to read a book: Lessons from the World’s Fastest Reader.

Speed Reading Resources
Speed Reading
Speed Reading Exercises
Instant Speed Learning
Reading Genius 
Reviews
Read Faster
Spreeder
Technical Reading Exercise (PDF)
Photo Reading
ATOS Readability Formula
Multimode Literacy 
Multimodal Literacy Narrative (youtube)
Test 4 Free
Laura Candler

Spatial Intelligence - Understanding - Seeing Impairment

There's a big difference between scanning what you're reading and fully comprehending what you're reading. Speed reading should be done for scanning large amounts of text, but not used for comprehending.

Meanings - Definitions

Meaning is what you mean or intend to express or convey. The idea that is intended. The message that is intended or expressed or signified. Have in mind as a purpose. Meant is to have a particular sense or meaning or have a specified degree of importance. Destine or designate for a certain purpose. Have as a logical consequence.

Understanding - Comprehending - Interpreting - Decoding - Ambiguity - Analogies - To Define is to Limit - Seeing the Whole Picture - Labels - Words can have Several Meanings - Context - Sarcasm - Propaganda - Comparisons - Definitions - Instructions - Word Games - Tone

Meaning in linguistics is the information or concepts that a sender intends to convey, or actually does convey, in communication with a receiver. 

Meaning-Making is the process of how people construe, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships, and the self.

Construe is to make sense of something or assign a meaning to something.

Capitonym is a word that changes its meaning and sometimes pronunciation when it is capitalized. Such as march and March.

Paralanguage is a component of meta-communication that may modify meaning, give nuanced meaning, or convey emotion, by using techniques such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, etc. Paralanguage is the nonlexical component of communication by speech, for example intonation, pitch and speed of speaking, hesitation noises, gesture, and facial expression. It is sometimes defined as relating to nonphonemic properties only. Paralanguage may be expressed consciously or unconsciously.

Inferential Role Semantics is an approach to the theory of meaning that identifies the meaning of an expression with its relationship to other expressions (typically its inferential relations with other expressions), in contradistinction to denotationalism, according to which denotations are the primary sort of meaning.

Meta-Communication is a secondary communication (including indirect cues) about how a piece of information is meant to be interpreted. It is based on the idea that the same message accompanied by different meta-communication can mean something entirely different, including its opposite, as in irony.

Explanation is a statement that makes something comprehensible by describing the relevant structure or operation or circumstances etc. Thought that makes something understandable and intelligible.

Articulate - Explain - Deconstruct - Substance - Braille

Description is a statement that represents something in words. The act of describing something. To give an account or representation of in words. Definition - Observation.

Authorial Intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in their work.

Intention is a mental state that represents a commitment to carrying out an action or actions in the future. Intention involves mental activities such as planning and forethought.

Predictable - Consistent - Symmetry - Depiction - Symbol

Meaning in non-linguistic is an actual or possible derivation from sentence, which is not associated with signs that have any original or primary intent of communication. It is a general term of art used to capture a number of different senses of the word "meaning", independently from its linguistic uses. Non-linguistic is language that is not consisting of or related to language. Nonlinguistic sounds such as whistles, yells, laughs, and cries.

Meaning in philosophy of language is the nature of meaning, its definition, elements, and types, was discussed by philosophers Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. According to them "meaning is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they mean (intend, express or signify)". One term in the relationship of meaning necessarily causes something else to come to the mind. In other words: "a sign is defined as an entity that indicates another entity to some agent for some purpose".

Mental Lexicon is defined as a mental dictionary that contains information regarding a word's meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on. The mental lexicon is a construct used in linguistics and psycholinguistics to refer to individual speakers' lexical, or word, representations. However, not all scientists agree as to the utility of the mental lexicon as a scientific construct. The mental lexicon differs from the lexicon in that it is not just a general collection of words; instead, it deals with how those words are activated, stored, processed, and retrieved by each speaker. An individual's mental lexicon changes and grows as new words are learned and is always developing, but there are several theorists that argue exactly how this occurs. Some theories about the mental lexicon include the spectrum theory, the dual-coding theory, Chomsky's nativist theory, as well as the semantic network theory. Scientists also study the areas of the brain involved in lexical representations. The following addresses some of the physiological, social, and linguistic aspects of the mental lexicon. Recent studies have also shown the possibility that the mental lexicon can shrink as an individual ages, limiting the amount of words they can remember and learn. The development of a second mental lexicon (L2) in bilingual speakers has also emerged as a topic of interest, suggesting that a speaker's multiple languages are not stored together, but as separate entities that are actively chosen from in each linguistic situation.

Determine is to establish meaning after a calculation, investigation, experiment, survey, or study. To shape or influence and give direction to something. To reach, make, or come to a decision about something.

Determinative is to define, qualify, or direct. Helps to clarify meaning and interpretation.

Determiner is a person or thing that determines or decides something. Translate.

Signify is to convey or express a meaning. Make something known with a word or signal.

Specify is to clearly and explicitly state something. To decide upon definitely. To give a value to something. To determine the essential quality of something. Select something or someone for a specific purpose. Specify as a condition or requirement in a contract or agreement; make an express demand or provision in an agreement.

Designate is to assign a name or title to something. To make something clearly understood by saying which place, direction, person, or thing; either spatially or figuratively. A sign.

Denotation is the most direct or specific meaning of a word or expression; the class of objects that an expression refers to. The act of indicating or pointing out by name.

Semantics is the study of meaning, reference or truth in language, programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics. It focuses on the relationship between signifiers like words, phrases, signs, and symbols and what they stand for or their denotation. Semantic Web.

Semiotics is a philosophical theory of the functions of signs and symbols. Analogies.

Semantic Change is the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage.

Syntax in linguistics is the grammatical arrangement of words in sentences. The study of the rules for forming admissible sentences. A systematic orderly arrangement.

Parse in grammar is to analyze syntactically by assigning a constituent structure to a sentence. Context.

Latent Semantic Analysis is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms. LSA assumes that words that are close in meaning will occur in similar pieces of text (the distributional hypothesis). A matrix containing word counts per paragraph (rows represent unique words and columns represent each paragraph) is constructed from a large piece of text and a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) is used to reduce the number of rows while preserving the similarity structure among columns. Words are then compared by taking the cosine of the angle between the two vectors (or the dot product between the normalizations of the two vectors) formed by any two rows. Values close to 1 represent very similar words while values close to 0 represent very dissimilar words.

Recursion is the repeated sequential use of a particular type of linguistic element or grammatical structure. Also called linguistic recursion. A linguistic element or grammatical structure that can be used repeatedly in a sequence is said to be recursive. Recursion has also been described more simply as the ability to place one component inside another component of the same kind. A linguistic element or grammatical structure that can be used repeatedly in a sequence is said to be recursive. English permits more than one adjective in a sequence in this manner is an example of a more general feature of languages that linguists call recursion. In English, prenominal adjectives are recursive. Simply put, this means that prenominal adjectives can be 'stacked,' with several appearing successively in a string, each of them attributing some property to the noun. In principle, there is no limit to the number of adjectives that can modify a noun. In English, recursion is often used to create expressions that modify or change the meaning of one of the elements of the sentence. (Hand me the nails that Dan bought.) - Recursion in computer science is a method of solving a problem where the solution depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem (as opposed to iteration). The approach can be applied to many types of problems, and recursion is one of the central ideas of computer science. Recursion in mathematics an expression such that each term is generated by repeating a particular. Mimic.

Biosemiotics is a field of semiotics and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, or production and interpretation of signs and codes and their communication in the biological realm.

Definitions

Definition is a statement of the meaning of a term, a word, phrase, or other set of symbols. Definitions can be classified into two large categories, intensional definitions (which try to give the essence of a term) and extensional definitions (which proceed by listing the objects that a term describes). Another important category of definitions is the class of ostensive definitions, which convey the meaning of a term by pointing out examples. A term may have many different senses and multiple meanings, and thus require multiple definitions. Dictionaries.

Analogy - Words can have Several Meanings - To define is to Limit

Define is to give the meaning of a word. To determine the essential quality of something.

Identify is to recognize something as being and establish the identity of someone or something. To give the name or identifying characteristics of something. To classify something or apply the appropriate name to something. Having the identity known or established. Patterns.

Designation is identifying word or words by which someone or something is called and classified or distinguished from others. The act of designating or identifying something. Designate is to assign a name or title to something. To make clear which place, direction, person, or thing; either spatially or figuratively, and sometimes with a sign.

The definition of a word does not explain everything about the word. And when people don't know the full meaning of a word, then that word becomes almost meaningless or irrelevant. Learning is much more than its definition explains. Understanding is much more than its definition explains. Knowledge is much more than its definition explains. Information is much more than its definition explains. Life is much more than its definition explains. Love is much more than its definition explains.

In the Definition of a Word: If there is a word in the definition of the word that needs to be more defined, then there will be a link to that words definition. This way the person can understand the original word more fully and more clearly. Avoid Being Vague.

Circular Definition is a definition that uses the term(s) being defined as a part of the definition or assumes a prior understanding of the term being defined. There are several kinds of circular definition, and several ways of characterizing the term: pragmatic, lexicographic and linguistic. Circular definitions may be unhelpful if the audience must either already know the meaning of the key term, or if the term to be defined is used in the definition itself. Talking in Circles.

Lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries. Theoretical lexicography is the scholarly discipline of analyzing and describing the semantic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships within the lexicon (vocabulary) of a language, developing theories of dictionary components and structures linking the data in dictionaries, the needs for information by users in specific types of situations, and how users may best access the data incorporated in printed and electronic dictionaries. This is sometimes referred to as 'metalexicography'.

Intention is the purpose of an anticipated outcome that guides your planned actions. Your goal.

Intension is what you must know in order to determine the reference of an expression.

Intensional definition gives the meaning of a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term. For example, an intensional definition of the word "bachelor" is "unmarried man". This definition is valid because being an unmarried man is both a necessary condition and a sufficient condition for being a bachelor: it is necessary because one cannot be a bachelor without being an unmarried man, and it is sufficient because any unmarried man is a bachelor.

Extensional Definition of a concept or term formulates its meaning by specifying its extension, that is, every object that falls under the definition of the concept or term in question. For example, an extensional definition of the term "nation of the world" might be given by listing all of the nations of the world, or by giving some other means of recognizing the members of the corresponding class. An explicit listing of the extension, which is only possible for finite sets and only practical for relatively small sets, is a type of enumerative definition. Extensional definitions are used when listing examples would give more applicable information than other types of definition, and where listing the members of a set tells the questioner enough about the nature of that set. This is similar to an Ostensive Definition, in which one or more members of a set (but not necessarily all) are pointed out as examples. The opposite approach is the intensional definition, which defines by listing properties that a thing must have in order to be part of the set captured by the definition. An ostensive definition conveys the meaning of a term by pointing out examples. This type of definition is often used where the term is difficult to define verbally, either because the words will not be understood (as with children and new speakers of a language) or because of the nature of the term (such as colors or sensations). It is usually accompanied with a gesture pointing out the object serving as an example, and for this reason is also often referred to as "definition by pointing". Ostensive definitions rely on an analogical or case-based reasoning by the subject they are intended to educate or inform.

Précising Definition is a definition that extends the lexical definition of a term for a specific purpose by including additional criteria that narrow down the set of things meeting the definition. For example, a dictionary may define the term "student" as "1. anyone attending an educational institution of any type, or 2. anyone who studies something." However, a movie theater may propose a precising definition for the word "student" of "any person under the age of 18 enrolled in a local school" in order to determine who is eligible to receive discounted tickets. Precising definitions are generally used in contexts where vagueness is unacceptable; many legal definitions are precising definitions, as are company policies. This type of definition is useful in preventing disputes that arise from the involved parties using different definitions of the term in question. A precising definition is intended to make a vague word more precise so that the word's meaning is not left to the interpretation of the reader or listener. Here is an example: From a class syllabus: "Class participation" means attending class, listening attentively, answering and asking questions, and participating in class discussions. This is similar to a stipulative definition, but differs in that a stipulative definition may contradict the lexical definition, while a precising definition does not.

Stipulative Definition is a type of definition in which a new or currently-existing term is given a specific meaning for the purposes of argument or discussion in a given context. When the term already exists, this definition may, but does not necessarily, contradict the dictionary (lexical) definition of the term. Because of this, a stipulative definition cannot be "correct" or "incorrect"; it can only differ from other definitions, but it can be useful for its intended purpose. For example, in the riddle of induction by Nelson Goodman, "grue" was stipulated to be "a property of an object that makes it appear green if observed before some future time t, and blue if observed afterward." "Grue" has no meaning in standard English; therefore, Goodman created the new term and gave it a stipulative definition.

Theoretical Definition is an abstract concept that defines a term in an academic discipline. Without a falsifiable operational definition, conceptual definitions assume both knowledge and acceptance of the theories that it depends on. A hypothetical construct may serve as a theoretical definition, as can a stipulative definition. A theoretical definition is a proposed way of thinking about potentially related events. Indeed, theoretical definitions contain built-in theories; they cannot be simply reduced to describing a set of observations. The definition may contain implicit inductions and deductive consequences that are part of the theory. A theoretical definition of a term can change, over time, based on the methods in the field that created it.

Does defining something limit that something?

With meanings, nothing is ever just black or just white, or just right or just wrong, or just good or just bad. When people see things as only black or white, they are more vulnerable to mistakes. And people also have a tendency to make assumptions, which breaks down communications. Everything needs to be defined in order to communicate effectively and efficiently. Just like with code, it's either on or off, stop or go.

One Word can have Several Meanings

Polysemy is the capacity for a word or phrase to have multiple meanings, usually related by contiguity or closeness of meaning within a semantic field, which  is a lexical set of words grouped semantically by meaning that refers to a specific subject. Polysemy is distinct from homonymy – or homophony – which is an accidental similarity between two words (such as bear the animal, and the verb to bear); while homonymy is often a mere linguistic coincidence, polysemy is not.

Meaning - Humor - Vague - Ambiguity - Circular Talk - Half Truth - Flawed Reasoning

Colexification describes the case when different meanings can be expressed by the same word in a language. Colexification is meant as a neutral, descriptive term that avoids distinguishing between vagueness, polysemy, and homonymy. World's largest database of cross-linguistic lexical associations.

Synonym are two words that can be interchanged in a context and are said to be synonymous relative to that context. Synonymous are two words meaning the same or nearly the same. Homonym.

Antonym is a word that expresses a meaning opposed to the meaning of another word, in which case the two words are antonyms of each other. Antonyms or opposites are words that lie in an inherently incompatible binary relationship as in the opposite pairs big : small, long : short. A word that expresses a meaning opposed to the meaning of another word, in which case the two words are antonyms of each other.

Auto-Antonym is a word with a homograph (another word of the same spelling) which is also an antonym (a word with the opposite meaning).

Top Five Words with Multiple Definitions: Set (464 definitions) - Run (396 definitions) - Go (368 definitions) - Take (343 definitions) - Stand (334 definitions). Break - Cut - Play - Make - Light - Clear - Draw - Give - Hold - Fall - Pass - Head - Carry - Call - Charge - Point - Catch - Check - Turn - Close - Get - Right - Cover - Lift - Line - Open - Beat.

Different words can have similar meanings. There are always a few words that share similar meanings and have similar definitions. So there is always a choice. Some words may work better than others. Profanity.

Predicate is one of two main parts of a sentence, the other part being the subject; the purpose of the predicate is to complete an idea about the subject, such as what it does or what it is like.

Irony is when something appears on the surface to be the case, but differs radically from what is actually the case. The difference of opinions between what might be expected and what actually occurs.

Snowclone is a cliché and phrasal template that can be used and recognized in multiple variants, like a sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants.

Anti-Proverb or a perverb, is the transformation of a standard proverb for humorous effect.

Words having several definitions and meanings which makes communication sometimes more complicated than it needs to be, which means that a person needs to be more knowledgeable, if not, then communication breaks down, and people can be manipulated by persuasive definitions.

Circular Definition is one that uses the term(s) being defined as a part of the definition or assumes a prior understanding of the term being defined. There are several kinds of circular definition, and several ways of characterizing the term: pragmatic, lexicographic and linguistic.

Recursion occurs when the definition of a concept or process depends on a simpler version of itself. Recursion is the process a procedure goes through when one of the steps of the procedure involves invoking the procedure itself. A procedure that goes through recursion is said to be 'recursive'. To understand recursion, one must recognize the distinction between a procedure and the running of a procedure. A procedure is a set of steps based on a set of rules, while the running of a procedure involves actually following the rules and performing the steps. Recursion is related to, but not the same as, a reference within the specification of a procedure to the execution of some other procedure. When a procedure is defined as such, this immediately creates the possibility of an endless loop; recursion can only be properly used in a definition if the step in question is skipped in certain cases so that the procedure can complete. But even if it is properly defined, a recursive procedure is not easy for humans to perform, as it requires distinguishing the new from the old, partially executed invocation of the procedure; this requires some administration as to how far various simultaneous instances of the procedures have progressed. For this reason, recursive definitions are very rare in everyday situations. A sentence can have embed instances of one category inside another.

Recursion in computer science is a method of solving a computational problem where the solution depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem.

Recursive Call is one where procedure A calls itself or calls procedure B which then calls procedure A again. Infinite Recursion occurs when the recursion does not terminate after a finite number of recursive calls. As the base condition is never met, the recursion carries on infinitely.

Self-Reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philosophy, it also refers to the ability of a subject to speak of or refer to itself, that is, to have the kind of thought expressed by the first person nominative singular pronoun "I" in English.

Back and forth Method is a method for showing isomorphism between countably infinite structures satisfying specified conditions.

Displacement in linguistics is the capability of language to communicate about things that are not immediately present (spatially or temporally); i.e., things that are either not here or are not here now.

Isomorphism is when two objects can be corresponding or similar in form and relations. Two isomorphic objects can have the same properties or isomorphic objects may be considered the same as long as one considers only these properties and their consequences. A structure-preserving mapping between two structures of the same type that can be reversed by an inverse mapping.

Malapropism is the mistaken use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical, sometimes humorous utterance. the unintentional misuse of a word by confusion with one that sounds similar.

Connotation is a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that some word or phrase carries, in addition to the word's or phrase's explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation.

Colloquialism is a word, phrase or other form used in informal language.

Catch My Drift is what someone says to someone when they want the other person to understand what they mean without them telling the other person exactly what they mean. They want the person to fill in the blanks.

Things are relative in certain contexts. Sometimes you only need one word to describe something or to communicate something. There are certain situations when you can have a high degree of certainty that the receiver will clearly understand what a single word means. There is no explanation or instructions needed because the person is aware and has previously learned what that single word means and knows what actions are needed to be taken. A person can also know what one sound means or what one color means, like when seeing a red light when driving a car in the city, you know that the colored red light means that you should stop. So sometimes you only need one word, and other times you may need many words to explain and understand something, which is almost all the time.

Homonym are words which sound alike or are spelled alike, but have different meanings. Can have the same pronunciation but have different meanings.

Homophony is the same pronunciation for words of different origins.

Homophone is a word that can be pronounced almost the same as another word but differs in meaning, spelling or both.

Examples of Homophones: pale/pail - ate/eight - alter/altar - band/banned - buy/bye/by - red/read - blew/blue - boar/bore - bare/bear - canon/cannon - coarse/course - fair/fare - genes/jeans - foul/fowl - grate/great - in/inn - hour/our - knight/night - no/know - nose/knows - maize/maze - meddle/metal - rain/reign - sea/see - role/roll - their/there/they're - veil/vale.

Oxymoron - Ambiguity

Homograph is a word that shares the same written form as another word but has a different meaning. spelt the same, but have different pronunciations and meanings.

Context

Context in language use refers to the text or speech surrounding an expression, word, sentence, or speech act. Context is the discourse that surrounds a language unit and helps to determine its interpretation. Context is the set of facts or circumstances that surround a situation or event. Verbal context influences the way an expression is understood, which is why citing people out of context can be very manipulative and vague.

Contextual Information is data that gives context to a person, entity or event. Context-awareness is the ability to extract knowledge from or apply knowledge to information.

Context helps define meaning, but you can take things out of context and change the meaning of the message, so it's the level of context that creates meaning, not just any context itself. Like taking a page from a book, there may be enough words to give you some understanding about what is being said on the page, but not enough understanding that explains the true meaning of that page. If the context that you use to explain something or show an example of something, if the context itself is idealistic, vague, narrow, irrelevant or ineffective, then the knowledge that you're trying to communicate becomes more harmful than beneficial.

Codes - Contrast - Same Word Different Meaning - Slang

Warning: Context can also be used to manipulate the meaning of a message, so comprehension is not always a guarantee. Some people just generalize and don't understand what's relative. So there is this invisible context, the layers of meaning that are not visible or written. Twisting someone's words around is when someone repeats something that you said, but tries to change the meaning of what you said by twisting your words around.

Cherry Picking Data - False Advertising - Propaganda - Slander

Out of Context is a message without the surrounding words or circumstances from which it was originally created, so the message is not fully understandable or sometimes manipulated.

Quoting out of Context is an informal fallacy in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning. The act of omitting something essential to clarify a message, intentionally or accidentally.

If you take some words out of context and if you only hear one thing that I say, while ignoring everything else that I say or have written, then those are not my words, those are your words. Your not allowed to pick and choose words that you want and then pretend to understand the message and pretend to know the meaning that you have interpreted from the source, you either choose the whole message and stop being vague and general with other peoples words, or people will just see your narrow mindedness message as propaganda and a manipulation of the facts, which is threatening to society. First educate yourself, and then share your opinion.

Subtext is the implicit meaning of a text—the underlying message that is not explicitly stated or shown. Subtext has been used historically to imply controversial subjects without drawing the attention of censors. This has been especially true in comedy and in science fiction, where it can sometimes be easier or safer to deliver a social critique.

Sub Routine - Sub Conscious - Pretext - Metaphor - Read Between the Lines - Story within a Story

Contextualism is the understanding that the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context. Epistemic contextualism.

Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source's intended meaning.

Decontextualized is isolating or removing information from its normal or expected context. It may occur deliberately, as when visual artists isolate a familiar object from its everyday context by turning it upside down or vastly expanding its size to reveal a new perspective about it, or nonconsciously, as when one’s memory of a traumatic event becomes dissociated from the context in which the trauma occurred and acquires a quality of unreality.

Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text. It is the interconnection between similar or related works of literature that reflect and influence an audience's interpretation of the text. Intertextual figures include: allusion, quotation, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche and parody. Intertextuality is a literary device that creates an 'interrelationship between texts' and generates related understanding in separate works. These references are made to influence the reader and add layers of depth to a text, based on the readers' prior knowledge and understanding. Intertextuality is a literary discourse strategy utilised by writers in novels, poetry, theatre and even in non-written texts (such as performances and digital media). Examples of intertextuality are an author's borrowing and transformation of a prior text, and a reader's referencing of one text in reading another. Intertextuality does not require citing or referencing punctuation (such as quotation marks) and is often mistaken for plagiarism. Intertextuality can be produced in texts using a variety of functions including allusion, quotation and referencing. However, intertextuality is not always intentional and can be utilised inadvertently or without knowledge or intention.

Hermeneutic Circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context. The whole defines the parts as the parts define the whole.

Key Word in Context or Concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, listing every instance of each word with its immediate context. Word Count.

Opaque Context is a linguistic context in which it is not always possible to substitute "co-referential" expressions (expressions referring to the same object) without altering the truth of sentences. substitution of co-referential expressions into an opaque context does not always preserve truth. For example, "Lois believes x is a hero" is an opaque context because "Lois believes Superman is a hero" is true while "Lois believes Clark Kent is a hero" is false, even though 'Superman' and 'Clark Kent' are co-referential expressions. Researchers use Wikipedia to give AI context clues.

Context-Dependent Memory is the improved recall of specific episodes or information when the context present at encoding and retrieval are the same. One particularly common example of context-dependence at work occurs when an individual has lost an item (e.g. lost car keys) in an unknown location. Typically, people try to systematically "retrace their steps" to determine all of the possible places where the item might be located. Based on the role that context plays in determining recall, it is not at all surprising that individuals often quite easily discover the lost item upon returning to the correct context. This concept is heavily related to the encoding specificity principle.

How the brain uses context in decision-making and learning. Resolving ambiguity. The orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus are areas of the brain that work together to help us sort through tasks that require resolving ambiguity, that is, situations in which the meaning of stimuli changes depending on context. The orbitofrontal occupies the front part of the brain right above the eyes. It's associated with reward valuation, planning, decision-making and learning. The dorsal hippocampus is located farther back, deeper into the brain, and it's associated with spatial navigation and episodic memory.

Pragmatics is the ways in which context contributes to meaning.

Text are the words of something written or the main body of a written work.

Content is what a communication is about or what something is about. The sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned. Everything that is included in a collection and that is held or included in something. Content can also mean being satisfied or showing satisfaction with things as they are, satisfy in a limited way. Open Content.

Content Analysis is a research method for studying documents and communication artifacts, which might be texts of various formats, pictures, audio or video. Social scientists use content analysis to examine patterns in communication in a replicable and systematic manner. One of the key advantages of using content analysis to analyze social phenomena is its non-invasive nature, in contrast to simulating social experiences or collecting survey answers. Comprehension - Contextual Analysis.

Deconstruction is a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning. Reconstruct.

Sense-Making is the process by which people give meaning to experience.

Understanding is to know and comprehend the nature or meaning of. To become aware of through the Senses.

Articulate is expressing yourself clearly and easily. Strategic Reading.

Recursion occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. The process of repeating items in a self-similar way.

Interpret - Media Words

Do I have to Spell it out for you? Sometimes you need to spell it out if you want someone to understand you. Spell it out means to provide a simple and understandable explanation.

Loaded Language is wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes.

Variations is something a little different from others of the same type. Widely different. Become different in some particular way, without permanently losing one's or its former characteristics or essence. Variables.

Content in media is the information and experiences that are directed towards an end-user or audience. Content is "something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing or any of various arts". Content can be delivered via many different media including the Internet, cinema, television, smartphones, audio CDs, books, e-books, magazines, and live events, such as speech, conferences and stage performances. Propaganda.

Translations - Interpretations

Intentionalism the theory that the meaning of any text is determined by the intentions of its author, whether stated or not.

Usage is the manner in which written and spoken language is used, the "points of grammar, syntax, style, and the choice of words", and "the way in which a word or phrase is normally and correctly used". Usage can mean the way people actually use language or prescriptively the way one group feels that people ought to use it.

Affirmative and Negative are terms of opposite meaning which may be applied to statements, verb phrases, clauses, or other utterances. Essentially an affirmative (positive) form is used to express the validity or truth of a basic assertion, while a negative form expresses its falsity. Examples are the sentences "Jane is here" and "Jane is not here"; the first is affirmative, while the second is negative.

Ambiguity

Ambiguity is a type of uncertainty of meaning in which several interpretations are plausible. An expression whose meaning cannot be determined from its context. Unclearness by virtue of having more than one meaning.

Ambiguous is something that can have two or more interpretations, sometimes intended to mislead. Having more than one possible meaning. Having no intrinsic or objective meaning. Something not organized in conventional patterns and having uncertain nature or significance.

Generalizing - Vague - Labels

Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is called not by its own name, rather by the name of something associated in meaning with that thing or concept.

Disambiguation is the process of resolving the conflicts that arise when a potential article title is ambiguous, most often because it refers to more than one subject covered.

Terminology is the study of terms and their use. Terms are words and compound words or multi-word expressions that in specific contexts are given specific meanings—these may deviate from the meanings the same words have in other contexts and in everyday language.

Operational Definition is a result of the process of operationalization and is used to define something (e.g. a variable, term, or object) in terms of a process (or set of validation tests) needed to determine its existence, duration, and quantity.

This is your brain on sentences. Brain activity patterns of word meanings within sentences measured by Brain Scans.

Linguistics - Dictionaries

Information Literacy - Speech - Philosophy

Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.

Binding Problem is a term used at the interface between neuroscience, cognitive science and philosophy of mind that has multiple meanings.

Counterfactual Conditional is a subjunctive conditional containing an if-clause that is contrary to fact.

Morphology in linguistics is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given language's morphemes and other linguistic units, such as root words, affixes, parts of speech, intonations and stresses, or implied context. In contrast, morphological typology is the classification of languages according to their use of morphemes, while lexicology is the study of those words forming a language's wordstock.

Morphological Dictionary is a linguistic resource that contains correspondences between surface form and lexical forms of words. Surface forms of words are those found in any text. The corresponding lexical form of a surface form is the lemma followed by grammatical information (for example the part of speech, gender and number). In English give, gives, giving, gave and given are surface forms of the verb give. The lexical form would be "give", verb. There are two kinds of morphological dictionaries: aligned and non-aligned.

Portmanteau is a linguistic blend of words, in which parts of multiple words, or their phones (sounds), and their meanings are combined into a new word, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, or motel, from motor and hotel. In linguistics, a portmanteau is defined as a single morph that represents two or more morphemes.

Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates.

Conjunction is a part of speech that connects words, sentences, phrases, or clauses.

Word Stem is a part of a word. In one usage, a stem is a form to which affixes can be attached. Thus, in this usage, the English word friendships contains the stem friend, to which the derivational suffix -ship is attached to form a new stem friendship, to which the inflectional suffix -s is attached. In a variant of this usage, the root of the word (in the example, friend) is not counted as a stem. In a slightly different usage, which is adopted in the remainder of this article, a word has a single stem, namely the part of the word that is common to all its inflected variants. Thus, in this usage, all derivational affixes are part of the stem. For example, the stem of friendships is friendship, to which the inflectional suffix -s is attached.

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.

Antecedent is an expression (word, phrase, clause, etc.) that gives its meaning to a pro-form (pronoun, pro-verb, pro-adverb, etc.)

Explication is making clear the meaning of things, so as to make the implicit explicit.

International Communication Association says friends are no better at interpreting correct emotional intent in e-mails than complete strangers.

Surface Forms and Meanings. A language is a set of surface forms and meanings, and a mapping between the surface forms and their associated meanings. In the earliest human languages, the surface forms were sounds but surface forms can be anything that can be perceived by the communicating parties such as drum beats, hand gestures, or pictures. A natural language is a language spoken by humans, such as English or Swahili. Natural languages are very complex since they have evolved over many thousands years of individual and cultural interaction. We focus on designed languages that are created by humans for some a specific purpose such as for expressing procedures to be executed by computers. We focus on languages where the surface forms are text. In a textual language, the surface forms are linear sequences of characters. A string is a sequence of zero or more characters. Each character is a symbol drawn from a finite set known as an alphabet. For English, the alphabet is the set a,b,c,…,za,b,c,…,z (for the full language, capital letters, numerals, and punctuation symbols are also needed).

Deep Structure and Surface Structure is a theoretical construct that seeks to unify several related structures.

Comprehend - Awareness

Underlying Representation is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phonological rules have applied to it.

Figure of Speech

Figure of Speech a special repetition, arrangement or omission of words with literal meaning, or a phrase with a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words.

Figuratively is a phrase that needs interpretation because it does not say exactly what it means, like with an oxymoron or a metaphor.

Literally is a phrase that is precise and clear and does not need to be interpretated.

Euphemism is a nicer word or expression used in place of one that may be found offensive or suggest something unpleasant.

Trope is the use of figurative language, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech. The word trope has also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative works.

Slang are words and phrases typically associated with the subversion of a standard variety. Profanity (bad words).

Cliché is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel.

Innuendo is an insinuation or intimation about a person or thing, especially of a denigrating or a derogatory nature.

Malapropism is the use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical, often humorous utterance.

Eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms). "Ice Cream" and "I scream".

Ersatz usually considered of inferior quality to the good it replaces.

Allusion is a figure of speech, in which an object or circumstance from unrelated context is referred to covertly or indirectly. It is left to the audience to make the direct connection. Where the connection is directly and explicitly stated (as opposed to indirectly implied) by the author, it is instead usually termed a reference. Satire.

Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text. It is the interconnection between similar or related works of literature that reflect and influence an audience's interpretation of the text. Articulate.

Juncture is the manner of moving (transition) or mode of relationship between two consecutive sounds. It is the relationship between two successive syllables in speech.

Riddle - Humor - Sarcasm - Propaganda - Errors

Misnomer is a word or term that suggests a meaning that is known to be wrong.

Acronyms is a word or name formed as an abbreviation from the initial components in a phrase or a word, usually individual letters. Acronym Finder.

Backronym is a constructed phrase that purports to be the source of a word that is an acronym. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. Pseudo-acronyms is when acronyms or other abbreviations do not stand for anything and cannot be expanded to some meaning. Such pseudo-acronyms may be pronunciation-based, such as "BBQ" (bee-bee-cue), for "barbecue", or "K9" (kay-nine) for "canine". Pseudo-acronyms also frequently develop as "orphan initialisms"; an existing acronym is redefined as a non-acronymous name, severing its link to its previous meaning. For example, the letters of the "SAT", a US college entrance test originally dubbed "Scholastic Aptitude Test", no longer officially stand for anything. Codes.

Anagram (word games) - Word Play

Palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward, such as madam or “taco cat” or racecar. Sentence-length palindromes may be written when allowances are made for adjustments to capital letters, punctuation, and word dividers, such as "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!", "Was it a car or a cat I saw?" or "No 'x' in Nixon". Composing literature in palindromes is an example of constrained writing.

Abbreviations is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Abbreviation Finder.

Aka is short for "Also known as", which is used to introduce any alternative name, which may be the actual real name or pseudonym, alias, nickname, working name, legalized name, pen name, maiden name, or title.

Nickname is a substitute for the proper name of a familiar person, place, or thing, for affection or ridicule.

Pseudonym or alias is a name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which can differ from their original or true name.

Symbolism is a system of symbols and symbolic representations, represents something else that is invisible. Express indirectly by an image.

Art - Code - Phonology

Styles in linguistics is the study and interpretation of texts in regard to their linguistic and tonal style.

Accents is a way of pronunciation, or a way of saying a word so that it sounds different. (loudness, length).

Dialects is a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. A pattern of speech.

Registers is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting.  (e.g. father vs. dad, child vs. kid, etc.).

Puns

Pun is a form of word play that suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect.

Pun Off World Championship

Rebus is an allusion device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana is a humorous saying that is used in linguistics as an example of a garden path sentence or syntactic ambiguity, and in word play as an example of punning, double entendre, and antanaclasis.

Word Nerds - Idioms

Sayings, Mottos, Proverbs - Narrative Modes

Does defining something limit that something?

Garden Path Sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down [or up] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced. Such a sentence leads the reader toward a seemingly familiar meaning that is actually not the one intended. It is a special type of sentence that creates a momentarily ambiguous interpretation because it contains a word or phrase that can be interpreted in multiple ways, causing the reader to begin to believe that a phrase will mean one thing when in reality it means something else. When read, the sentence seems ungrammatical, makes almost no sense, and often requires rereading so that its meaning may be fully understood after careful parsing.

Analogies - Metaphors

Metaphor is a hidden comparison between two things that are unrelated but share some common characteristics. A figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity. Metaphor is to suggest a similarity between two things in order to increase the understanding of something by showing an example that is not directly related but shares certain underlying features. Metaphor is to use something as an example of how to look at something else in order to understand it more accurately. Even though two things are not related, they can share some common details or factors, that when applied to a particular circumstance, they can have similar understandings or make you aware of certain contradictions. Show a good example without distorting the message.

Satire - The Other Side of the Story - A Different Way to Look at It - Pros and Cons

Analogy is a type of reasoning that states if things agree in some respects they probably agree in others. An analogy is drawing a comparison in order to show a similarity in some respect. Analogical reasoning is any type of thinking that relies upon an analogy that avoids making a false equivalence.

Cause - Associations - Adaptations - Passage - Precedent - Compare - Figure of Speech

Pastiche is a work of art that imitates the style of some previous work, or a work of visual art, literature, theatre, music, or architecture that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates, rather than mocks, the work it imitates. In literary usage, the term denotes a literary technique employing a generally light-hearted tongue-in-cheek imitation of another's style; although jocular, it is usually respectful. The word implies a lack of originality or coherence, an imitative jumble, but with the advent of postmodernism, pastiche has become positively construed as deliberate, witty homage or playful imitation. Pastiche also means a musical composition consisting of a series of songs or other musical pieces from various sources.

Allegory is to convey hidden meanings through symbolic figures, actions, imagery, and/or events. A metaphor in which a character, place or event is used to deliver a broader message about real-world issues and occurrences. It can readily illustrate or convey complex ideas and concepts in ways that are comprehensible or striking to its viewers, readers, or listeners. Writers or speakers typically use allegories as literary devices or as rhetorical devices that convey semi-hidden or complex meanings through symbolic figures, actions, imagery, or events, which together create the moral, spiritual, or political meaning the author wishes to convey.

Fairy Tales - Fantasy - Fantasy Films

Trope is a metaphorical use of a word or expression. Language used in a figurative or nonliteral sense or in a figure of speech. A substitution of a word or phrase by a less literal word or phrase.

Moral of a story is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim, which is a saying that is widely accepted on its own merits. Parable is a short moral story and a type of an analogy. Fable is a brief fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized (given human qualities, such as the ability to speak human language) and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a pithy maxim or saying.

Parable is a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson, as told by Jesus in the Gospels. A short moral story, sometimes with animal characters. Parable is a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse, that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. It differs from a fable in that fables employ animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as characters, whereas parables have human characters. A parable is a type of metaphorical analogy.

Semiotics is the study of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. (semiosis) Puns - Lables.

Sign in semiotics is something that can be interpreted as having a meaning, which is something other than itself, and which is therefore able to communicate information to the one interpreting or decoding the sign. Signs can work through any of the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory or taste, and their meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition.

Not to confuse Metaphoric Symbols with Facts.

Double Entendre is a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to be understood in either of two ways, having a double meaning.

Synonyms is a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language.

Dichotomy is a partition of a whole or a set into two parts or subsets. In other words, this couple of parts must be, jointly exhaustive. Everything must belong to one part or the other, and, mutually exclusive. Nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts.

Plot refers to the sequence of events inside a story which affect other events through the principle of cause and effect.

Parallelism is a balance within one or more sentences of similar phrases or clauses that have the same grammatical structure.

Reference is a relation between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to another object.

Comparisons

Comparing is the act of examining resemblances, similarities, differences and significance. Showing a relation based on similarities and differences. Sometimes seeing similarities in dissimilar things.

Pros and Cons - Analogies - Observations - Two Sides to a Coin - Illusion of Control - Flawed Reasoning - Bias - Decisions - Choosing

Similar is having the same or similar characteristics. Words expressing closely related meanings. Capable of replacing or changing places with something else; permitting mutual substitution without loss of function or suitability. Resembling is to appear like something or be similar or bear a likeness to something else. 

Similarity in psychology refers to the psychological nearness or proximity of two mental representations. "That's nice, but on the other hand, it can also be bad".

"Things which equal the same thing are also equivalent to one another" ~ Euclid Elements.

Ratings - Mind Maps - Filtering - Statistics - False Equivalence - Is everything Connected?

Criterion is a basis for comparison; a reference point against which other things can be evaluated. The ideal in terms of which something can be judged.

Transitive Relation if whenever an element a is related to an element b, and b is in turn related to an element c, then a is also related to c. Transitivity (or transitiveness) is a key property of both partial order relations and equivalence relations.

Gestalt Principle of organization holding that (other things being equal) parts of a stimulus field that are similar to each other tend to be perceived as belonging together as a unit.

Cross-Correlation is a measure of similarity of two series as a function of the displacement of one relative to the other. This is also known as a sliding dot product or sliding inner-product. It is commonly used for searching a long signal for a shorter, known feature. It has applications in pattern recognition, single particle analysis, electron tomography, averaging, cryptanalysis, and neurophysiology. Correlations.

Optimization Problem is the problem of finding the best solution from all feasible solutions. Optimization problems can be divided into two categories depending on whether the variables are continuous or discrete.

Mathematical Optimization is the selection of a best element (with regard to some criterion) from some set of available alternatives.

Dichotomy is a division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different. Dichotomy is a partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets). In other words, this couple of parts must be jointly exhaustive: everything must belong to one part or the other, and mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts. Such a partition is also frequently called a bipartition. The two parts thus formed are complements. In logic, the partitions are opposites if there exists a proposition such that it holds over one and not the other. Treating continuous variables or ulticategorical variables as binary variables is called dichotomization. The discretization error inherent in dichotomization is temporarily ignored for modeling purposes.

Contrast is the act of distinguishing by comparing differences. A conceptual separation or distinction. The opposition or dissimilarity of things that are compared. To show differences when compared. The perceptual effect of the juxtaposition of very different colors.

Subset a set A is a subset of a set B, or equivalently B is a superset of A, if A is "contained" inside B, that is, all elements of A are also elements of B. A and B may coincide. The relationship of one set being a subset of another is called inclusion or sometimes containment. Connected.

Characteristic is any measurable property of a device measured under closely specified conditions.

Distinctions is a description of distinct differences between things being unlike or dissimilar. A distinguishing difference or quality.

Difference is being unlike or dissimilar. A significant change. A variation. Diversity.

Alternative is one of a number of things from which only one can be chosen. Serving or used in place of another. Necessitating a choice between mutually exclusive possibilities.

Option is something that can be chosen. Another choice from which to chose from or one of a number of things from which only one can be chosen. The act of choosing or selecting. Plan B.

Comparative is a syntactic construction that serves to express a comparison between two (or more) entities or groups of entities in quality, quantity, or degree.

Multiple Comparisons occurs when one considers a set of statistical inferences simultaneously or infers a subset of parameters selected based on the observed values. It is also known as the look-elsewhere effect, which is a phenomenon in the statistical analysis of scientific experiments, particularly in complex particle physics experiments, where an apparently statistically significant observation may have actually arisen by chance because of the size of the parameter space to be searched

Paired Comparison is any process of comparing entities in pairs to judge which of each entity is preferred, or has a greater amount of some quantitative property, or whether or not the two entities are identical. The method of pairwise comparison is used in the scientific study of preferences, attitudes, voting systems, social choice, public choice, and multiagent AI systems. In psychology literature, it is often referred to as paired comparison.

Pairwise Comparison is any process of comparing entities in pairs to judge which of each entity is preferred, or has a greater amount of some quantitative property, or whether or not the two entities are identical. The method of pairwise comparison is used in the scientific study of preferences, attitudes, voting systems, social choice, public choice, requirements engineering and multiagent AI systems. In psychology literature, it is often referred to as paired comparison.

Multiple Comparisons Problem occurs when one considers a set of statistical inferences simultaneously or infers a subset of parameters selected based on the observed values. It is also known as the look-elsewhere effect.

Mutual Information - Variables

Salience is the quality of being particularly noticeable, important or prominent. Salience of an item is the state or quality by which it stands out from its neighbors. Saliency detection is considered to be a key attentional mechanism that facilitates learning and survival by enabling organisms to focus their limited perceptual and cognitive resources on the most pertinent subset of the available sensory data. Saliency typically arises from contrasts between items and their neighborhood, such as a red dot surrounded by white dots, a flickering message indicator of an answering machine, or a loud noise in an otherwise quiet environment. Saliency detection is often studied in the context of the visual system, but similar mechanisms operate in other sensory systems. What is salient can be influenced by training: for example, for human subjects particular letters can become salient by training. When attention deployment is driven by salient stimuli, it is considered to be bottom-up, memory-free, and reactive. Conversely, attention can also be guided by top-down, memory-dependent, or anticipatory mechanisms, such as when looking ahead of moving objects or sideways before crossing streets. Humans and other animals have difficulty paying attention to more than one item simultaneously, so they are faced with the challenge of continuously integrating and prioritizing different bottom-up and top-down influences. Executive Functions.

False Equivalence is a logical fallacy which describes a situation where there is a logical and apparent equivalence, but when in fact there is none. This fallacy is categorized as a fallacy of inconsistency repercussions. Invalid Arguments.

Rational Choice Theory postulates that an individual will perform a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether an option is right for them. It also suggests that an individual's self-driven rational actions will help better the overall economy. Rational choice theory looks at three concepts: rational actors, self interest and the invisible hand

Choices - Options

Choice is the act of choosing or selecting something, sometimes by judging the merits of multiple options and then selecting one or more of them.

Choose is to select, or pick out from a number of alternatives. Select as an alternative over another. See fit or proper to act in a certain way; decide to act in a certain way.

The illusion of Choice is when people have made choices for you, so that you may not have a choice to make. Will power can also be an illusion.

Selected is something chosen, sometimes in preference to another. To make a selection from a number of alternatives.

Option is one of a number of things from which only one can be chosen. The act of choosing or selecting.

Multiple Choice is a test where you are shown several possible answers but only one is correct. You must choose the right answer from other possible answers or select only the correct answer from the choices offered on a list. Multiple choice items consist of a stem and several alternative answers, among which are the correct ("keyed") answer and one or more incorrect ("distractor") answers.

Filtering - Menus - Comparing

"No one can see beyond a choice they don't understand, so choice can either be the problem or the solution."

Choice Blindness is the failure to detect a mismatch or when two things are bad or unsuitable and do not go together.

Choice-Supportive Bias is retroactively thinking that our choices were more informed than they actually were. We also assign positive attributes to the choices we made, after the fact. So a person may keep making the same mistakes.

Biases - Contradictions

Fork in the Road is when you have to make a decision about something and choose a direction to take. Fork in the road
is a metaphor for a deciding moment in life when you have to make a choice from several options. Intersection is an at-grade junction where two or more roads or streets meet or cross.

Public Choice studies self-interested agents and their interactions, which can be represented in a number of ways. Public choice theory is also closely related to social choice theory, a mathematical approach to aggregation of individual interests, welfares, or votes.

Social Choice Theory is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual opinions, preferences, interests, or welfares to reach a collective decision or social welfare in some sense.

Preference is choosing between alternatives; someone has a preference for A over B if they would choose A rather than B.

Preferred is something more desirable than another thing and liked better and value more highly above all others. Select as an alternative over another and promote over another. Bias.

Preference in economics is the order that a person or agent gives to alternatives based on their relative utility, a process which results in an optimal "choice" (whether real or theoretical). Instead of the prices of goods, personal income, or availability of goods, the character of the preferences is determined purely by a person's tastes. However, persons are still expected to act in their best (that is, rational) interest. Using the scientific method, social scientists try to model how people make practical decisions in order to test predictions about human behavior. Although economists are usually not interested in what causes a person to have certain preferences, they are interested in the theory of choice because it gives a background to empirical demand analysis. Preference is the ordering of alternatives based on personal wants instead of utility or practical use.

One choice will not change everything, but one choice could change the path that your on or change the direction of your life, which will lead you to have a lot of different experiences that you never planned for. So I would not say that one choice will change everything, I would say that some things are going to change if you make a particular choice, but how many things will change or how much things will change will depend on the choice, and the timing of the choice and the place where the choice was made. Some choices may seem small and insignificant, but they could have a big impact on your life, and some choices may be big and monumental but have very little impact on your life. So it's more than the choice, it's everything else surrounding the choice. Decisions.

Free Will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded. It is closely linked to the concepts of responsibility, praise, guilt, sin, and other judgments which apply only to actions that are freely chosen. It is also connected with the concepts of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. There are numerous different concerns about threats to the possibility of free will, varying by how exactly it is conceived, which is a matter of some debate. Some conceive free will to be the capacity to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events. Free Will comes from awareness and having knowledge of what is right and wrong, good and bad. If you believe that you don't have freewill, then you will blame your mistakes on other people and other influences, even though it's your own ignorance making bad decisions. Determinism - What's the Point?

Will in philosophy is that faculty of the mind which intentionally selects, at the moment of decision, the strongest desire from among the various desires present. Will does not refer to any particular desire, but rather to the capacity to act decisively on one's desires. Within philosophy the will is important as one of the distinct parts of the mind, along with reason and understanding. It is considered important in ethics because of its central role in enabling a person to act deliberately.

Volition is the capability of conscious choice and decision and intention. The act of making a choice.

Decision Making - Path to Take

Rational Choice Theory are determinants of the individual choice based on preferences instead of facts.

Choice Modeling attempts to model the decision process of an individual or segment via revealed preferences or stated preferences made in a particular context or contexts. Typically, it attempts to use discrete choices (A over B; B over A, B & C) in order to infer positions of the items (A, B and C) on some relevant latent scale (typically "utility" in economics and various related fields).

Dan Gilbert: Choices (video) - Sheena Iyengar: On the Art of Choosing (video)

Theory of the Second Best if one optimality condition in an economic model cannot be satisfied, it is possible that the next-best solution involves changing other variables away from the values that would otherwise be optimal. Politically, the theory implies that if it is infeasible to remove a particular market distortion, introducing a second (or more) market distortion may partially counteract the first, and lead to a more efficient outcome.

File Comparison is the calculation and display of the differences and similarities between data objects, typically text files such as source code.

Social Comparison Theory is the belief that there is a drive within individuals to gain accurate self-evaluations. The theory explains how individuals evaluate their own opinions and abilities by comparing themselves to others in order to reduce uncertainty in these domains, and learn how to define the self.

Benchmarking is comparing one's business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies.

Side by Side Comparisons - Visualizing Tools - Mind Maps

Associations - Matrix - Relational Database

Simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two things.

Odds is the likelihood of a thing occurring rather than not occurring. The ratio by which one better's wager is greater than that of another.

Ratio is a relationship between two numbers indicating how many times the first number contains the second. The relative magnitudes of two quantities (usually expressed as a quotient). The relation between things (or parts of things) with respect to their comparative quantity, magnitude, or degree.

Information Ratio - Statistics

Combinatorics the study of finite or countable discrete structures.

Combination is a way of selecting items from a collection.

Derangement is a permutation of the elements of a set, such that no element appears in its original position.

Permutation elates to the act of arranging all the members of a set into some sequence or order, or if the set is already ordered, rearranging (reordering) its elements, a process called permuting.

Coded Messages - Secret Code

Code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form or representation, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a channel or storage in a medium.

Decoding - Computer Code - DNA Code - Bar Code - Symbols

Morse Code is a method of transmitting text information as a series of on-off tones, lights, signals or clicks that can be directly understood by a skilled listener or observer without special equipment.

Steganography is the practice of concealing a file, message, image, or video within another file, message, image, or video.

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages; various aspects in information security such as data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation are central to modern cryptography.

Crack the Code is to figure out how to do something that is difficult or complex. To solve a difficult problem or mystery. Deciphering coded intelligence.

Cryptic Message is a message that is difficult to understand because it has a hidden meaning or is unclear and mysterious because of the way it was written. Lost Symbol Project.

Internet Privacy - Private Information - Block Chain (bitcoin) - Context

Cryptanalysis is the study of analyzing information systems in order to study the hidden aspects of the systems.

Encrypt is to convert ordinary language into code.

Translation - Interpretation - Comprehension

Encryption is the process of encoding messages or information in such a way that only authorized parties can read it. Encryption does not of itself prevent interception, but denies the message content to the interceptor.

Encryption Software is software that can encrypt and decrypt data, often in the form of files on a hard drive or packets sent over a network.

Key in cryptography is a piece of information, usually a string of numbers or letters that are stored in a file, which, when processed through a cryptographic algorithm, can encode or decode cryptographic data. Based on the used method, the key can be different sizes and varieties, but in all cases, the strength of the encryption relies on the security of the key being maintained. A key’s security strength is dependent on its algorithm, the size of the key, the generation of the key, and the process of key exchange. Knowledge is Key - Key

Encryption Key is a random string of bits created explicitly for scrambling and unscrambling data.

Researchers help close security hole in popular encryption software: Cybersecurity researchers have helped close a security vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to steal encryption keys from a popular security package by briefly listening in on unintended 'Side Channel' signals from smartphones. Side channel attacks extract sensitive information from signals created by electronic activity within computing devices during normal operation.

A new chip for decoding data transmissions demonstrates record-breaking energy efficiency. The chip, which can decipher any encoded signal, could enable lower-cost devices that perform better while requiring less hardware. A new chip called ORBGRAND can decode any code applied to data transmitted over the internet with maximum accuracy and between 10 and 100 times more energy efficiency than other methods.

Scrambled is to mix together into random order or in a disorderly fashion to make something unintelligible, or not clearly understood or expressed.

Symbols - Petroglyphs - Words - Data Compression

Homoglyph is one of two or more graphemes, characters, or glyphs with shapes that appear identical or very similar. Like the letter 0 and the number Zero O; or the number 1 and the letter l and I. Ones and Zeros.

Code Talker are people in the 20th century who used obscure languages as a means of secret communication during wartime.

Code-talker Paradox is a situation in which a language prevents communication.

Code Word is an element of a standardized code or protocol. Each code word is assembled in accordance with the specific rules of the code and assigned a unique meaning. Code words are typically used for reasons of reliability, clarity, brevity, or secrecy.

Code Word is a word or a phrase designed to convey a predetermined meaning to a receptive audience, while remaining inconspicuous to the uninitiated.

Code Name is a word or name used, sometimes clandestinely, to refer to another name, word, project or person. Names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage. They may also be used in industrial counter-industrial espionage to protect secret projects and the like from business rivals, or to give names to projects whose marketing name has not yet been determined. Another reason for the use of names and phrases in the military is that they transmit with a lower level of cumulative errors over a walkie-talkie or radio link than actual names.

Code-Switching occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation.

Interactive Proof System is an abstract machine that models computation as the exchange of messages between two parties. The parties, the verifier and the prover, interact by exchanging messages in order to ascertain whether a given string belongs to a language or not. The prover is all-powerful and possesses unlimited computational resources, but cannot be trusted, while the verifier has bounded computation power. Messages are sent between the verifier and prover until the verifier has an answer to the problem and has "convinced" itself that it is correct.

Proof of Knowledge is an interactive proof in which the prover succeeds in 'convincing' a verifier that the prover knows something.

Zero-Knowledge Proof is a challenge to prove that someone possesses knowledge of certain information without revealing the information itself or any additional information. It is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that they know a value x, without conveying any information apart from the fact that they know the value x. The statement being proved must include the assertion that the prover has such knowledge, but not the knowledge itself. Otherwise, the statement would not be proved in zero-knowledge because it provides the verifier with additional information about the statement by the end of the protocol. A zero-knowledge proof of knowledge is a special case when the statement consists only of the fact that the prover possesses the secret information.

Decoding is the activity of making a message clear or converting a coded message from code into plain text. Decoding is to convert code into ordinary language. Decoding is the process of interpreting a message sent by an addresser or the person sending the message, to an addressee or the person receiving the message.

Decoding Skills are the tools needed to make sense of the spoken or written word. These skills are necessary in order to read, write and speak. Decoding is the ability to apply your knowledge of letter-sound relationships, including knowledge of letter patterns, to correctly pronounce written words. Understanding these relationships gives children the ability to recognize familiar words quickly and to figure out words they haven't seen before. Phonological awareness includes the ability to segment sounds, rhyme, and identify syllables. Another component of Decoding is alphabetic knowledge, or The Alphabetic Principle, which is the understanding that letters are used to represent speech sounds.

Encoding is the process of creating a message for transmission to an addressee or to the person to whom something is addressed to or intended for.

Encoding Specificity Principle provides a framework for understanding how the conditions present while encoding information relate to memory and recall of that information.

Semiotics is a philosophical theory of the functions of signs and symbols.

Decipher is to convert from cryptic to intelligible language. Convert code into ordinary language. Change from one system to another.

Pattern Recognition - Interpret

Decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of texts written in obscure languages, which are almost always ancient. Decipherment overlaps with another technical field known as cryptanalysis, a field that aims to decipher writings used in secret communication, known as ciphertext.

Ciphertext is the result of encryption performed on plaintext using an algorithm, called a cipher, which is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure.

Multilingual Inscriptions: When a text is written in multiple languages, scholars can compare the translations to decipher the unknown language. For example, the Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799, was inscribed in three languages: hieroglyphs, demotic, and ancient Greek. Since ancient Greek was already known, scholars were able to use it to decode the other two languages.

AI and Deep Learning are new technologies that use deep neural networks that can help scholars reconstruct historical languages. For example, Ithaca is a deep neural network that can restore ancient texts and place them in time.

Philology is the study of ancient languages, and a person who studies ancient languages is called a philologist.

Decoding Methods is the process of translating received messages into codewords of a given code. There have been many common methods of mapping messages to codewords. These are often used to recover messages sent over a noisy channel, such as a binary symmetric channel.

Aberrant Decoding how messages can be interpreted differently from what was intended by their sender. Every communication act requires that the messages must be encoded into a set of signs by the sender. These signs must then be transmitted and decoded by the receiver to understand the contained messages. The code system must be shared by both the sender and the receiver in order for the communication to succeed. For example, thoughts must be encoded into words, transmitted through air, and then be decoded back to thoughts. Often the sender has a certain meaning to convey with his message, hoping the receiver will interpret it correctly. This right interpretation can be called the preferred decoding or preferred reading. When the interpretation of the message is different from what was intended, this can be called aberrant decoding. Aberrant decodings can occur in a more widespread range of situations, as wrong interpretation of a media product or text whose incoming message is not the one intended by the creator of the product or text.

Encoding in semiotics is the process of creating a message for transmission by an addresser to an addressee. The complementary process – interpreting a message received from an addresser – is called decoding.

Character Encoding is used to represent a repertoire of characters by some kind of encoding system. Depending on the abstraction level and context, corresponding code points and the resulting code space may be regarded as bit patterns, octets, natural numbers, electrical pulses, etc. A character encoding is used in computation, data storage, and transmission of textual data. "Character set", "character map", "codeset" and "code page" are related, but not identical, terms. Early character codes associated with the optical or electrical telegraph could only represent a subset of the characters used in written languages, sometimes restricted to upper case letters, numerals and some punctuation only. The low cost of digital representation of data in modern computer systems allows more elaborate character codes (such as Unicode) which represent most of the characters used in many written languages. Character encoding using internationally accepted standards permits worldwide interchange of text in electronic form.

List of Unicode Characters contains a repertoire of over 136,000 characters covering 139 modern and historic scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets.

"Learning is like cracking a secret code, if you don't start learning how to crack the code, then you will never crack it because codes don't crack themselves."

Cant is the jargon or argot of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group. (Cryptolect)

Password is a word or string of characters used for user authentication to prove identity or access approval to gain access to a resource (example: an access code is a type of password), which is to be kept secret from those not allowed access.

Code word as a figure of speech is a word or a phrase designed to convey a predetermined meaning to a receptive audience, while remaining inconspicuous to the uninitiated.

Duress Code is a covert distress signal used by an individual who is being coerced by one or more hostile persons. It is used to warn others that they are being forced to do something against their will.

Decoder Types (wiki)

Known-Plaintext Attack is an attack model for cryptanalysis where the attacker has access to both the plaintext (called a crib), and its encrypted version (ciphertext). These can be used to reveal further secret information such as secret keys and code books.

Flag Semaphore is the telegraphy system conveying information at a distance by means of visual signals with hand-held Flags, rods, disks, paddles, or occasionally bare or gloved hands. Information is encoded by the position of the flags; it is read when the flag is in a fixed position. Semaphores were adopted and widely used (with hand-held flags replacing the mechanical arms of shutter semaphores) in the maritime world in the 19th century. It is still used during underway replenishment at sea and is acceptable for emergency communication in daylight or, using lighted wands instead of flags, at night. Meaning to bear; altogether the sign-bearer. It's kind of like reading numbers on a clock, telling the time using letters and different numbers.

Patterns - Symbols - Computer Programing - Data

Secret is something not open or public; kept private, hidden or not revealed. Not openly made known. Conducted with or marked by hidden aims or methods. Prevent from being seen or discovered. Be or go into hiding; keep out of sight, as for protection and safety. Make undecipherable or imperceptible by obscuring or concealing.

Codes and special phrases have a purpose, to transmit information in social groups so that only the receiver knows the meaning, and codes can also provide technical information quickly and easily. Chemistry.

QR Code is a type of information matrix barcode (or two-dimensional barcode) first designed for the automotive industry in Japan. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that contains information about the item to which it is attached. A QR code uses four standardized encoding modes (numeric, alphanumeric, byte/binary, and kanji to efficiently store data; extensions may also be used. Barcode only holds information in the horizontal direction. QR Code can carry information both vertically and horizontally and two-dimensionally and is capable of being read in 360 degrees from any direction, thus eliminating any interference and negative effects from backgrounds. QR code also has an algorithm which is used to create QR codes that allows for an error margin of approx. 7-30%. QR code can also carry hundred times more information in a smaller space when compared to a barcode.

Barcode is an optical, machine-readable, representation of data; the data usually describes something about the object that carries the barcode.

Supply Chain Traceability - Smart Labels

The USPS Facility Deciphers Illegible Handwriting at the United States Postal Service Remote Encoding Center.

"Hey, thanks for defining the word "many" for me. It means a lot."

Finding the Right Words using Thesaurus and other Tools

Interpretation is a mental representation of the meaning or significance of something. An explanation of something that is not immediately obvious. Translations.

Passage is a section of text, particularly a section of medium length. The act of passing from one state or place to the next.
Sayings.

Explanation is a statement that makes something comprehensible by describing the relevant. Structure or operation or circumstances etc. Thought that makes something comprehensible.

Understood is fully apprehended as to purport or meaning or explanation. Know and comprehend the nature or meaning of.
Make sense of a language. Understanding.

Learning Methods

Does Language and Vision work together to help you interpret what you're seeing?

Related Subjects: Media Keywords - Poetry - Art - Creativity - Story Telling - Religion - Glyph - Mind Maps - Identity - Intelligence - Book Types.

"People can still get the wrong impressions even when you modify a message to make sure that people don't get the wrong impression. People can still can get the wrong impression because of the way you modified the question in anticipation of the possible wrong impression. This is why we sometimes need to say, "please don't take this in the wrong way, but..."

Labels - Labeling

Label is text that is written or printed that gives information about something or displays information about a particular product.

Labeling is describing someone or something in a word or short phrase.

Labeling Theory is the theory of how the self-identity and behavior of individuals may be determined or influenced by the terms used to describe or classify them.

Mislabeled is something labeled falsely and incorrectly that is in violation of statutory requirements or is not adhering to normal labeling rules for safety.

Misnomer is an incorrect or unsuitable name. A misnomer is a wrong name or inaccurate name or designation. A name that is incorrectly applied.

Double Entendre is a word or phrase that is open to two interpretations, one of which is usually risqué or indecent. An ambiguity with one interpretation that is indelicate.

Labels can be very useful and also time saving. But labels can also be general and vague, so you don't always see the whole picture or clearly understand something enough, usually because you're lacking certain information. There are many levels and you're only seeing the surface. So you have to be extremely careful how you use labels and how you see them. Some labels can discriminate, and some labels can even manipulate meaning. Words have can have more than one meaning, and labels can have more than one word. Never allow your thinking and understanding to be restricted or boxed in by single words or by labels that can easily blind you from seeing the whole picture.

A label is not a name of a person, or does a label single out a criminal by their birth name. If a person in a family commits a crime, only that person is guilty, not the whole family. People who use labels to condemn people by their ethnicity or by their color or by their religion, will end up condemning themselves to the same hatred and discrimination from others who also use labels. Pointing a finger at a label will only end up labeling yourself. If you live by the label, you will die by the label, nameless and soulless.

Discrimination - Racism - Profiling - Slander - Pronouns

I can't say that I know a person that I never met or talked to. And even if I did talk to someone, I'm sure there is still a lot of things I don't know about that person. Prejudice is pretending to know someone based a few superficial factors. Prejudice people like use labels that would give a vague description of someone, but they don't know that person because they never met them or talked to them. Prejudice is a type of ignorance. If you're pretending to know things, it means you're an idiot, and you're also a dangerous person becuase you don't live in reality. The fantasy world that prejudice people create is a world full of risks and vulnerabilities.

Prejudice is a preconceived opinion or a biased opinion that is not based on reason, truth or actual experience. Prejudice in Law is harm or injury that results or may result from some action or judgment.

When people slap a label on something, they can fail to see beyond the label, and if you can't see beyond the label, then the label can do more harm than good. Just like when a label is inaccurate or misleading, people can make assumptions and then make mistakes based on those assumptions, and sometimes those mistakes can be very costly.

Labels don't explain everything, labels only make assumptions. And people would assume that you're an idiot since you believe that a label is a replacement for facts and evidence. People have names and names are not labels. So the only way to know someone is to talk to someone, which takes time and effort, and the ability to have a real conversation is a skill that not everyone has. This goes way beyond having patience and tolerance, you need to be knowledgeable, and you need to be educating yourself on a regular basis. That takes commitment. You have to promise yourself to never stop learning. Investing in yourself is the most important investment that you will ever make. Invest wisely in your education and you will reap the benefits of being wise.

Using language to signal that something is "new and different" is a marketing tool that is used often.

John Cena - Love Has No Labels "We Are America" (youtube) - #weareamerica

Mislabeling people or mislabeling information or mislabeling your thoughts can be extremely damaging and dangerous. It would be extremely stupid to label something before you actually knew what it was. If you don't understand something accurately enough, then you should not label it, because you would be a moron if you did. Mislabeling or labeling something incorrectly can be damaging and dangerous, like with mislabeled medications, mislabeled food or mislabeled products, or mislabeling anything that would cause harm or confusion.

A lot of people just love to slap labels onto things as if that thoroughly explains all the contents about what something is. This is why ignorant people are so easily confused. Most people never read the label or read the fine print. And they never educate themselves enough to understand what the definitions mean, or that there is missing information that you may not have knowledge of. You can categorize things, but what are the associations? When things are not explained properly then people become content with being unaware, which means they will be ignorant their entire life. Voters.

Warning Label is a label attached to an item, or contained in an item's instruction manual, warning the user about risks associated with the use of the item, and may include restrictions by the manufacturer or seller on certain uses. Most of them are placed to limit civil liability in lawsuits against the item's manufacturer or seller. That sometimes results in labels which for some people seem to state the obvious. (even when you label a cigarette pack that says "smoking kills, there are still some people who will smoke".)

Food Labels (not always accurate)

Stereo Types - Define is to Limit - Butterfly Effect (cause and effect)

You have to be careful how you see labels and understand them. Though labels are convenient to use, labels are not a full definition, or a full description of the contents. Whether a label refers to people, or material objects, you have to see beyond just a few details, you have to see the whole picture.

Categorical Thinking is thinking by assigning people or things to categories and then using the categories as though they represented something in the real world. For example, we think of people as either male or female, and force them
to fit into one of the categories, even when it doesn't seem to fit at all. Relative. 

The words we use to describe things are just temporary labels. In order to fully describe anything, so that it can be fully understood, you need to use more then words and symbols. This is because meaning is not just what you see on the surface. There are always several layers of meaning beyond what you can see and beyond what the label describes. So never see things as being one dimensional. Because everyone knows that we live in a 3 dimensional world and that we are always discovering more and more about the world, a world that goes way beyond what we see or feel.

Visual Tools - Environment - Space (magnets) - Chemistry - E-Books

Tag is a label attached to someone or something for the purpose of identification or to give other information.

Metadata - DNA - Comprehension

Labels do not describe all the layers, labels only give you a starting point from which to inquire more information.

We should identify individuals by their name, and not label them with an affiliation. If a person wants to label themselves with something that cannot accurately define them as a person, then they should be described as a unidentified person.

If a group of individuals commits a crime, then those individuals must be apprehended and questioned. This is not about revenge or punishment, this is about learning from these particular individuals, and finding out why this crime was committed so that we can correct this misunderstanding and find ways to keep these crimes from repeating in the future.

If a person or persons claims to represent a group, we cannot use this label publicly when referring to these particular criminals, because that would cause other people who are not involved in the crime to be apprehended, questioned and victimized, which would waste time, people and resources, and not help find the actual criminals. Guantanamo (wiki)

Labels like terrorist, extremist, fundamentalist, or any religious name, are confusing and distracting. A physical description of a person is the most effective means in finding a criminal. And if they have a name that would also help. A persons religion or affiliation does not explain who a person is as an individual. A persons personal beliefs can not be defined by a single name, or can an individual be defined by their personal name. The only way to know some one is to spend time with them and learn, listen and understand the story of their life, and the experiences that help shape them into the person that they are today.

Everyone is born an individual, and that is how we treat each other, as individuals.

Racism, Prejudice, Discrimination are all barriers. They destroy the mind, they destroy communication, they destroy the hearts and the the souls of all who are afflicted with these illogical behaviors.

Letters - Words - Symbols

Alphabet is a standard set of letters or basic written symbols that are used to write words in one or more languages based on the general principle that the letters represent phonemes or basic significant sounds of the spoken language. There are 26 letters in the English Alphabet that can be used to create over million different words. (English letters written in uppercase and lower case in the photo on right.) - Evolution of the Alphabet (image).

English Alphabet is a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. It originated around the 7th century from Latin script. Since then, letters have been added or removed to give the current Modern English alphabet of 26 letters with no diacritics, digraphs, nor special characters. The word alphabet is a compound of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Beta is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2.

Letter is a grapheme or written character in an alphabetic system of writing.

Oldest known alphabet unearthed in ancient Syrian city. Archaeological findings suggest alphabetic writing is some 500 years older than thought. The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years. Language History.

Initial is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph that is larger than the rest of the text. Uppercase or Capital Letter.

Acronym - Code - Decoding - Symbols

Letter Case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger upper case (also uppercase, capital letters, capitals, caps, large letters, or more formally majuscule) and smaller lower case (also lowercase, small letters, or more formally minuscule) in the written representation of certain languages.

Silent Letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation. Phonetic transcriptions that better depict pronunciation and which note changes due to grammar and proximity of other words require a symbol to show that the letter is mute. Handwritten notes use a circle with a line through it and the sound is called "zero"; It resembles the symbol for the "empty set", but must not be confused with the Danish and Norwegian letter Ø. In printed or computer's graphic presentation, the symbol Ø is used.

Text is any object that can be read. Words of something written. Fonts.

Character is a written symbol that is used to represent speech. Characters are the basic symbols that are used to write or print a language. Character is a sign. Character Acting.

Chinese Characters has 50,000 to 100,000 different characters in written Chinese language, though a comprehensive modern dictionary will rarely list over 20,000 in use. An educated Chinese person will know about 8,000 characters, but you will only need about 2-3,000 to be able to read a newspaper. Letters don't have any meaning by themselves. A Chinese character on the other hand is a more complex unit. It contains an indication of pronunciation as well as an indication of meaning. English Words.

Logogram or logograph is a written character that represents a word or phrase.

Graphemes are a written symbol that is used to represent speech. Grapheme is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. 

ASCII is abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters. ASCII is the traditional name for the encoding system; the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) prefers the updated name US-ASCII, which clarifies that this system was developed in the US and based on the typographical symbols predominantly in use there. ASCII is one of a 1963 List of IEEE milestones.

Wingdings is a series of dingbat fonts that render letters as a variety of symbols.

Dingbat is an ornament or a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames (similar to box-drawing characters), or as a dinkus (section divider). Some of the dingbat symbols have been used as signature marks or used in bookbinding to order sections.

Letter Like Symbols is a Unicode block containing 80 characters which are constructed mainly from the glyphs of one or more letters. In addition to this block, Unicode includes full styled mathematical alphabets, although Unicode does not explicitly categorize these characters as being "letterlike". Math Symbols (functions).

Phonics (sounds) - Vowels

Glyph is glyptic art in the form of a symbolic figure carved or incised in relief. Glyph in computing is a graphic symbol or small picture, e.g. on an icon. Glyph is an elemental symbol within an agreed set of symbols, intended to represent a readable character for the purposes of writing.

Hieroglyph is a character of the ancient Egyptian writing system.

Visual Language - Labels - Ancient Symbols - Sacred Text - Symbols - Decoding - Double Meaning - Knowledge Preservation - Alexandria

Egyptian Hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt. It combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts are derived from hieroglyphic writing; Meroitic was a late derivation from Demotic.

Petroglyph is an image created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images. Petroglyphs are found worldwide, and are often associated with prehistoric peoples. The word comes from the Greek prefix petro-, from πέτρα petra meaning "stone", and γλύφω glýphō meaning "carve", and was originally coined in French as pétroglyphe.

Geoglyph is a large design or motif produced on the ground by durable elements of the landscape, such as stones, stone fragments, gravel, or earth. A positive geoglyph is formed by the arrangement and alignment of materials on the ground in a manner akin to petroforms, while a negative geoglyph is formed by removing part of the natural ground surface to create differently coloured or textured ground in a manner akin to petroglyphs. Geoglyphs are generally a type of land art, and sometimes rock art and generally longer than 4 metres. A hill figure is created on a slope, so that it can be seen from a distance or from high in the air. Perhaps the most famous geoglyphs are the Nazca lines in Peru. The cultural significance of these geoglyphs for their creators remains unclear, despite many hypotheses.

Phaistos Disc is a disk of fired clay from the Minoan palace of Phaistos on the island of Crete, possibly dating to the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age (second millennium B.C.). The disk is about 15 cm (5.9 in) in diameter and covered on both sides with a spiral of stamped symbols. Its purpose and meaning, and even its original geographical place of manufacture, remain disputed, making it one of the most famous mysteries of archaeology. This unique object is now on display at the archaeological museum of Heraklion. Features 241 tokens, comprising 45 distinct signs.

Voynich Manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), Some of the pages are missing, with around 240 remaining. The text is written from left to right, and most of the pages have illustrations or diagrams. Some pages are foldable sheets.

Motif in visual arts is an element of an image. A motif may be repeated in a pattern or design, often many times, or may just occur once in a work.

Iconography studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct from artistic style.

Latin Alphabet is the writing system originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin Language. (c. 700 BC – present). The classical Latin alphabet consisted of 23 letters, 21 of which were derived from the Etruscan alphabet. In medieval times the letter I was differentiated into I and J and V into U, V, and W, producing an alphabet equivalent to that of modern English with 26 letters. ISO Basic Latin Alphabet (PDF).

Greek Alphabet was used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. It is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science and other fields.

Ugaritic Alphabet is a cuneiform abjad used from around either the fifteenth century BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages (particularly Hurrian) were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere.

Phoenician Alphabet is the oldest verified alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad consisting of 22 letters, all consonants, with matres lectionis used for some vowels in certain late varieties. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. (c.1200–150 BC)

Phoenicia was a thalassocratic ancient Semitic speaking Mediterranean civilization that originated in the Levant in the west of the Fertile Crescent. Scholars generally agree that it included the coastal areas of today's Lebanon, northern Israel and southern Syria reaching as far north as Arwad, but there is some dispute as to how far south it went, the furthest suggested area being Ashkelon. Its colonies later reached the Western Mediterranean (most notably Carthage) and even the Atlantic Ocean. The civilization spread across the Mediterranean between 1500 BC and 300 BC.

Numbers are the Root of Language - Geometric Language

Symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different concepts and experiences. All communication (and data processing) is achieved through the use of symbols. Symbols take the form of words, sounds, gestures, ideas or visual images and are used to convey other ideas and beliefs. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a blue line might represent a river. Numerals are symbols for numbers. Alphabetic letters may be symbols for sounds. Personal names are symbols representing individuals. A red rose may symbolize love and compassion. The variable 'x', in a mathematical equation, may symbolize the position of a particle in space.

Color Symbols - Meanings - Decoding - Ancient Symbols - Petroglyphs - Logos - Braille

Symbolism is a system of symbols and symbolic representations. The practice of investing things with symbolic meaning.

Symbolism Types (wiki) - Samples of Symbols - Symbolism

Symbology is the study or the use of symbols.

Semiotics is a philosophical theory of the functions of signs and symbols.

Symbolic Linguistic Representation is a representation of an utterance that uses symbols to represent linguistic information about the utterance, such as information about phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, or semantics. Symbolic linguistic representations are different from non-symbolic representations, such as recordings, because they use symbols to represent linguistic information rather than measurements.

Symbol Grounding Problem addresses the challenge of connecting symbols, such as words or abstract representations, to the real-world objects or concepts they refer to. In essence, it is about how symbols acquire meaning in a way that is tied to the physical world. It is concerned with how it is that words or symbols in general get their meanings, and hence is closely related to the problem of what meaning itself really is. The problem of meaning is in turn related to the problem of how it is that mental states are meaningful, and hence to the problem of consciousness: what is the connection between certain physical systems and the contents of subjective experiences.

Which is easier to remember, symbols or words? Symbols might be more easily remembered because they give concrete visuals to abstract ideas, and symbols may also be easier to remember because they are unique and tend to represent a single concept, whereas words can have multiple meanings.

Mnemonic Symbol is a symbol that is used to assist the human memory and is based on human experience and knowledge, such as an image of a national flag to represent a country, a + symbol to represent addition, or the letters MPY to represent multiply.

Winged Wheel is a symbol used historically on monuments by the Ancient Greeks and Romans and more recently as a heraldic charge. The symbol was associated with the Ancient Greek god Hermes and as a representation of the chariot (or velocipede) of Triptolemus. In heraldry the symbol has been used to represent transport, speed and progress. A three-winged wheel was chosen as the logo of the British Cyclists' Touring Club and at one point was considered "cycling’s most famous symbol". A two-winged version formed the logo of the London General Omnibus Company and, after a merger, formed the basis of the modern London Underground roundel.

Wings Symbolism: Wings are used by birds, angels, insects, and planes. Wings enable a thing to soar and reach heights that would otherwise be unattainable. This function has given wings deep symbolism, making it a perfect symbol to represent a variety of meanings, including success, aspiration, purity, and freedom, if you were granted wings, where would you go? Escape is closely related to the freedom symbolism, wings are a symbol of escape because they allow birds to fly over walls and other confinements. Wings are symbols for success, because wings help birds and insects soar. Wings are associated with purity because of birds like doves that are seen to be pure and to bring peace and divine messages. Wings are symbols for refuge and support. This symbolic meaning derives from the nature of birds to protect their eggs and their chicks with their wings and cover their young with their wings. A lot of winged animals use their wings to show off their prowess to potential mates and to their opponents in fights. Broken Wings that are broken or clipped symbolize a loss of freedom and independence. Wings are a symbol of spirituality and transcendence. Like with Angels, fairies, griffins and the Pegasus.

Nike was a goddess who personified victory in any field including art, music, war, and athletics. She is often portrayed in Greek art as Winged Victory in the motion of flight, however, she can also appear without wings as "Wingless Victory" when she is being portrayed as an attribute of another deity such as Athena.

Bird Symbolism tends to associate birds with infinite possibilities, renewal, eternity, and the transition between life and death. The bird is the symbol of the spirit of life. Birds mostly fly to the heavens although some also occupy the waters. The sheer number of birds in the world probably explains why these animals are part of virtually every culture on earth.

Serpent or Snake, is one of the oldest and most widespread mythological symbols. The word is derived from Latin serpens, a crawling animal or snake. Snakes have been associated with some of the oldest rituals known to mankind and represent dual expression of good and evil. In some cultures, snakes were fertility symbols. Although snakes live on the earth, as well as “below” the earth (the underworld), water snakes occupy the waters. As they are oviparous and lay eggs, the bird and the serpent embody depictions of birth; and as birds molt and snakes shed their skin, they also represent regeneration. In Neolithic Europe, death and rebirth were tied together in the tomb which served as a ritual place for rebirth as well as representing a mother’s womb. In Sumerian mythology, as the process of death is believed to lead to regeneration, she who presided over death also presided over rebirth. Medicine Symbol.

Plant Symbolism (wiki)

ISO 7000 Graphical Symbols for use on equipment includes symbols for all types of equipment, from automobiles and home entertainment products to earth-moving machinery. ISO 7010 (wiki) - Standards.

OCHA Humanitarian Icons v.02

Sign Language - Math Symbols

SCP Field Codes were adopted from old hobo signs and thief symbols used to alert others in the know of dangers, marks, and obstacles in the area. Many Foundation task forces have their own set, with symbols unique to their usual assignments. At least one has refined their code to such a degree it's practically a language on its own, able to communicate multiple details with a few strokes added or changed. It's important to keep in mind that in the field when dealing with anomalies, we never know exactly what will have to be dealt with. Reality benders and paranatural phenomena turn the chaos of entering a hostile environment inside out and upside down. Every week I read reports of teams sent on routine exploration missions only for them to wander into alternate realities, houses with warped space-time and death machines built by madmen and anartists. Contact with command will be lost. Technology will fail. Rooms will shift. Teams will be split up. Imposters will try to pass as teammates. To not be prepared for the unexpected is suicidal and has lead to the deaths of more men and women than we have any right to forget. When choosing symbols and what they represent, it is important for teams to agree upon their meaning together and to keep the designs simple. A stick figure with an X over its face. Two circles next to each other with a line connecting them. A half-circle ending in two parallel lines. Signs should be easy to draw in as few strokes as possible under stressful circumstances. Whether drawn in chalk, marker or blood. You may need to draw it before sprinting out of the room or with your one remaining hand. There is no central database of field codes. It is considered best practice for teams to come up with their own symbols and to change the designs as time goes on. A lot of rookies like to point out the "symbols have been compromised," sign being the scariest to see, right along with, "do not be taken alive." While there are threats that can reach into the mind and glean the meaning of the symbols, those are few and far between. You face something like that, you're already fucked more ways to Sunday. Most anomalies and hostile environments don't have that level of intelligence or ability. Some don't even register us as sentient beings. We're nothing more than food or material to them. Even a sentient skip watching from the shadows will be hardpressed to see a symbol and correctly assume the meaning left behind. At best they might copy what they see drawn, but without the proper understanding of the meaning, it can be easy enough to spot when a copycat is trying to sow confusion. Signs for cleared rooms, staying quiet, strange phenomena can have wide application. The, "do not follow the little girl," symbol is a bit of a tongue in cheek joke about how many creepy little girls seem to hang out in abandoned mansions, laughing from the shadows and asking people to play with them. In actuality, the symbol is more properly explained as, "do not follow the obvious bait." Predatory anomalies often use humans or the pretense of a human in distress to lure personnel into dangerous situations and away from the main group. If someone seems out of place or is too conveniently found, there's a good chance you're walking into a trap. While every potential threat and possible scenario can't be planned for and expressed with a few lines, taking the time to draw up shorthand for expected anomalies or common obstacles in the field can save lives. Established ahead of time, field codes bring a strategical advantage in otherwise overwhelming hostile environments.

Codes - Computer Codes

Pictogram is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Sound Resemblance.

Ideogram is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases.

Logogram is a written character that represents a word or phrase. Visual Language - Shapes.

Yerkish is an artificial language developed for use by non-human primates. It employs a keyboard whose keys contain lexigrams, symbols corresponding to objects or ideas. A lexigram represents a word but is not necessarily indicative of the object to which it refers. Lexigrams were notably used by the Georgia State University Language Research Center to communicate with bonobos and chimpanzees. Researchers and primates were able to communicate using lexigram boards made in up to three panels with a total of 384 keys.

Warning Sign indicates a hazard ahead on the road that may not be readily apparent to a driver. Emergencies.

Labels - Message Boards

Syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words.

Syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter and its stress patterns.

Palaeography is the study of ancient and historical handwriting (that is to say, of the forms and processes of writing, not the textual content of documents). Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria. The discipline is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating ancient texts. However, it cannot in general be used to pinpoint dates with high precision.

Structural Anthropology is a school of anthropology that states immutable deep structures exist in all cultures, and consequently, that all cultural practices have homologous counterparts in other cultures, essentially that all cultures are equitable.

Text Analysis Software - Text-to-Speech

Chinese Character (wiki)

Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions which form its signs. Cuneiform Script is one of the earliest systems of writing, was invented by the Sumerians. It is distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. The name cuneiform itself simply means "wedge shaped". Cistercian Monks Numbering System - 13th Century (image).

Babylonian Numerals were written in cuneiform, using a wedge-tipped reed stylus to make a mark on a soft clay tablet which would be exposed in the sun to harden to create a permanent record.

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed.

Power Symbol is a symbol indicating that a control activates or deactivates a particular device. Universal power symbols are described in the International Electro-Technical Commission 60417 standard, Graphical symbols for use on equipment, appearing in the 1973 edition of the document (as IEC 417) and informally used earlier. The well-known on/off power symbol was the result of the logical evolution in user interface design. Originally, most early power controls consisted of switches that were toggled between two states demarcated by the words On and Off. As technology became more ubiquitous, these English words were replaced with the universal symbols line "|" and circle "o" (typically without serifs) to bypass language barriers. This standard is still used on toggle power switches. The symbol for the standby button was created by superimposing the symbols "|" and "o"; however, it is commonly interpreted as the numerals "0" and "1". Yet the IEC holds these symbols as a graphical representation of a line and a circle. Reset Button (reboot) - Power Switch.

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Unicode 10.0, contains a repertoire of 136,755 characters covering 139 modern and historic scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets and emoji. The character repertoire of the Unicode Standard is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646, and both are code-for-code identical. Unicode Special Characters (image).

Keyboard Symbols - Writing

Washing Clothes Symbols (image)

XO or X followed by Zero. Xs and Os, another name for the game Tic-tac-toe. XOXO is a term used for expressing sincerity, faith, love, or good friendship at the end of a written letter, email or SMS text message. X/0, a notation for the division by zero. Ox (nickname), Ox zodiac, one of the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac. Ox Chinese constellation, one of the 28 mansions of the Chinese constellations. Oxalate in chemistry sometimes abbreviated as ox when it forms coordination compounds. X0 is a sex-determination system as found in insects. Open-Xchange, a "collaboration software" suite and the company that sponsors it.

Ø Slashed Zero is a representation of the number '0' (zero), with a slash through it. The slashed zero glyph is often used to distinguish the digit "zero" ("0") from the Latin script letter "O" anywhere that the distinction needs emphasis, particularly in encoding systems, scientific and engineering applications, computer programming (such as software development), and telecommunications. It thus helps to differentiate characters that would otherwise be homoglyphs. It was commonly used during the punched card era, when programs were typically written out by hand, to avoid ambiguity when the character was later typed on a card punch. Unlike in the Scandinavian vowel 'Ø' and the "empty set" symbol '∅', the slash of a slashed zero usually does not extend past the ellipse in most typographic designs. However, the slashed zero is sometimes approximated by overlaying zero and slash characters, producing the character "0̸". In character encoding terms, it has no explicit codepoint, but it is an alternate glyph (in addition to the open zero glyph) for the zero character.

The number 'zero' is shaped more like an oval while the letter 'o' is shaped like a circle. The military did the right thing by banning the letters I and O from their MGRS coordinate system, so that they can use the essential numerals 0 and 1 with no ambiguity. In the heat of battle you don't want an artillery officer fumbling on a laptop trying to find a suitable font to avoid confusion between 0 and O. And you also don't want a password or a part number to be confusing either.

Letter O or the Number Zero? Why are zero and the letter “O” both circles? The answer involves both science and mysticism. Ayin (also ayn, ain;) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic abjads. Egyptian hieroglyph for “eye,” the letter O is the fourth most popular letter in the English alphabet. The sound is probably a derivation of the Arabic letter called ‘Ayn. Greek O, or omicron, which literally means “small o.” In contrast, the Greek word omega means “great O.” English alphabet has stayed true to the original Egyptian graphic. In mathematics, the number 0, or simply zero, most likely derived its shape from the sun and the moon. Many have ascribed divine qualities to circles. The study of the circle eventually led to the development of astronomy, geometry and calculus. Zeros and Ones.

Words

Word is a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with other words or sometimes alone to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed using letters. A unit of language that native speakers can identify. Choose and use particular words in order to say or write (something). A brief statement. A verbal command for action. Put into words or an expression. Information about recent and important events. An exchange of views on some topic. A promise. A word is a string of bits stored in computer memory. A secret word or phrase known only to a restricted group. Word is the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning). A word or a symbol is compressed information. This contrasts deeply with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own. Vocabulary. There are only two one-letter words in English, they are A and I (ai). Common two-letter words are of, to, in, it, is, be, as, at, so, we, he, by, or, on, do, if, me, my, up, an, go, no, us, am.

Root Word is a word that does not have a prefix (in front of the word) or a suffix (at the end of a word).

Sounds that Words Make - Vowels

Keyword in linguistics is a word which occurs in a text more often than we would expect to occur by chance alone.

Keyword in rhetoric is a word that academics use to reveal the internal structure of an author's reasoning.

Click Bate - Buzzwords - Word Games

Keywords can be used to manipulate information and used to distract people into believing that they understand the message, even when it is obviously vague. Keywords that advertisers like to use: free, exclusive, easy, limited, get, guaranteed, you, because. Keywords that politicians like to use: socialism, big government, left-wing, right-wing, witch hunt, taxes, jobs. Keyword Types (wiki) - Metadata - Library Science.

Keyword in computer programming is a word or identifier that has a particular meaning to the programming language.

Keyword in cryptography is a word used as the key to determine the letter matching's of the cipher alphabet to the plain alphabet.

Index Term is a word or expression used as a keyword to retrieve documents in an information system such as a catalog or a search engine.

Definitions (meaning) - Grammar

Semitic Root are the roots of verbs and most nouns in the Semitic languages that are characterized as a sequence of consonants or "radicals" (hence the term consonantal root). Such abstract consonantal roots are used in the formation of actual words by adding the vowels and non-root consonants (or "transfixes") which go with a particular morphological category around the root consonants, in an appropriate way, generally following specific patterns. It is a peculiarity of Semitic linguistics that a large majority of these consonantal roots are triliterals (although there are a number of quadriliterals, and in some languages also biliterals).

Function Word has been highly influential in the grammar used in second language acquisition and English Language teaching. Function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are the glue that holds sentences together. Thus, they serve as important elements to the structures of sentences. Words that are not function words are called content words (or open class words or lexical words or autosemantic words): these include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs, although some adverbs are function words (e.g., then and why). Dictionaries define the specific meanings of content words, but can only describe the general usages of function words. By contrast, grammars describe the use of function words in detail, but treat lexical words in general terms only.

Morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. In other words, it is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is freestanding. When it stands by itself, it is considered as a root because it has a meaning of its own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is an affix because it has a grammatical function (e.g. the –s in cats to indicate that it is plural). Every word comprises one or more morphemes.

Morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words, such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words, and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary.

Inflection is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, and mood. The inflection of verbs is also called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions, postpositions, numerals, articles etc, as declension.

Fluency is the property of a person or of a system that delivers information quickly and with expertise.

Etymology is the study of the history of words.

Word Games - The Word (the power of words) - Speech - Vocabulary.

Word Superiority Effect refers to the phenomenon that people have better recognition of letters presented within words as compared to isolated letters and to letters presented within nonword (orthographically illegal, unpronounceable letter array) strings. Speed Reading.

Portmanteau is a blend of words in which parts of multiple words are combined into a new word. (motel, from motor and hotel) - (smog, by blending smoke and fog).

Onomatopoeia is a word that phonetically imitates, resembles or suggests the sound that it describes. Onomatopoetic - (of words) formed in imitation of a natural sound; "onomatopoeic words are imitative of noises"; the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named (e.g., cuckoo, sizzle).

Grammatical Functions

Noun is a word that functions as the name of some specific thing or set of things, such as living creatures, objects, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas. The word class that can serve as the subject or object of a verb, the object of a preposition, or in apposition. Noun is a content word that can be used to refer to a person, place, thing, quality, or action. Lexical categories (parts of speech) are defined in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.

Word Class - Transition Words - Vocabulary - Grammar - Sounds

Noun Phrase is a phrase which has a noun (or indefinite pronoun) as its head, or which performs the same grammatical function as such a phrase. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type. Noun phrases often function as verb subjects and objects, as predicative expressions, and as the complements of prepositions. Noun phrases can be embedded inside each other; for instance, the noun phrase some of his constituents contains the shorter noun phrase his constituents.

Grammatical Case is a special grammatical category of a noun, pronoun, adjective, participle or numeral whose value reflects the grammatical function performed by that word in a phrase, clause or sentence. In some languages, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, determiners, participles, prepositions, numerals, articles and their modifiers take different inflected forms, depending on their case. As a language evolves, cases can merge (for instance, in Ancient Greek, the locative case merged with the dative case), a phenomenon formally called syncretism.

Determiner is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular number or quantity, etc. Common kinds of determiners include definite and indefinite articles (like the English the and a or an), demonstratives (this and that), possessive determiners (my and their), quantifiers (many, few and several), numerals,
distributive determiners (each, any), and interrogative determiners (which).

Content Word is a word to which an independent meaning can be assigned.

Context are words that surrounds another word or a language unit that helps to determine its interpretation.

Pronoun is a word that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase. (I, me, he, she, herself, you, it, that, they, them, those, us, each, few, many, who, whoever, whose, someone, everybody, etc.)

Labels - Slander - Grammar - Question Words

Personal Pronoun are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as I), second person (as you), or third person (as he, she, it, they). Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number (usually singular or plural), grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects (as the English personal pronoun it usually does). Personal Pronoun is a pronoun expressing a distinction of person.

Neopronoun are a category of neologistic English third-person personal pronouns beyond "she", "he", and "they", as well as "one" and "it". Neopronouns are preferred by some non-binary individuals, as they may feel that neopronouns provide more options to reflect their gender identity more accurately than any conventional pronoun. Neopronouns can be words created to serve as pronouns like "ze/hir" or "noun-self" pronouns where pre-existing words are turned into personal pronouns like "fae/faeself". Some neopronouns allude they/them, such as "ey/em", a form of Spivak pronoun.

Indefinite Pronoun is a pronoun which does not have a specific familiar referent. Indefinite pronouns are in contrast to definite pronouns.

How are pronouns processed in the memory-region of our brain? A new study shows how individual brain cells in the hippocampus respond to pronouns. 'This may help us unravel how we remember what we read.'

Verb is a content word that denotes an action, occurrence, or state of existence. The word class that serves as the predicate of a sentence. Verb is a word (part of speech) that in syntax conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand).

Mood is used to refer to a verb category or form which indicates whether the verb expresses a fact (the indicative mood), a command (the imperative mood), a question (the interrogative mood), a condition (the conditional mood), or a wish or possibility (the subjunctive mood). Verb inflections that express how the action or state is conceived by the speaker. Modes.

Predicate is one of the two main constituents of a sentence; the predicate contains the verb and its complements. Make the (grammatical) predicate in a proposition. Affirm or declare as an attribute or quality of. Involve as a necessary condition of consequence; as in logic. (logic) what is predicated of the subject of a proposition; the second term in a proposition is predicated of the first term by means of the copula. Predicate as one of two main parts of a sentence, the other part being the subject; the purpose of the predicate is to complete an idea about the subject, such as what it does or what it is like. The predicate of a sentence mostly corresponds to the main verb and any auxiliaries that accompany the main verb; whereas the arguments of that predicate (e.g. the subject and object noun phrases) are outside the predicate.

Antecedent is a thing or event that existed before or logically precedes another. Preceding in time or order; previous or preexisting.

Preposition is a function word that combines with a noun or pronoun or noun phrase to form a prepositional phrase that can have an adverbial or adjectival relation to some other word. (linguistics) the placing of one linguistic element before another (as placing a modifier before the word it modifies in a sentence or placing an affix before the base to which it is attached).

Appositive is a noun or noun phrase that renames another noun right beside it. The appositive can be a short or long combination of words. Look at these appositive examples, all of which rename insect: The insect, a spider, is crawling across the kitchen table.

Irregular Verb is any verb whose conjugation follows the typical pattern, or one of the typical patterns, of the language to which it belongs. A verb whose conjugation follows a different pattern is called an irregular verb. (This is one instance of the distinction between regular and irregular inflection, which can also apply to other word classes, such as nouns and adjectives.).

Auxiliary Verb is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it appears, such as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany a main verb. The main verb provides the main semantic content of the clause. An example is the verb have in the sentence I have finished my dinner. Here, the main verb is finish, and the auxiliary have helps to express the perfect aspect. Some sentences contain a chain of two or more auxiliary verbs. Auxiliary verbs are also called helping verbs, helper verbs, or (verbal) auxiliaries. Profanity.

Verb Framing are typological descriptions of a way that verb phrases in a language can describe the path of motion or the manner of motion, respectively. Some languages use it and others do not.

Gerund is a term for a verb form that functions as a noun. In English, the term has been applied to -ing forms in certain uses. Traditional grammar made a distinction within -ing forms between present participles and gerunds, a distinction that is not observed in such modern linguistically-informed grammars as A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

Non-Finite Verb is of any of several verb forms that are not finite verbs; they cannot serve as the root of an independent clause. Most nonfinite verbs found in English are infinitives, participles and gerunds. (They sometimes are called verbals, but that term has traditionally applied only to participles and gerunds.) Additional nonfinite forms found in some other languages include converbs, gerundives and supines.

Adverb is a word that modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, noun phrase, clause, or sentence.

Adjective is a describing word, the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified.

Superlative is any of several verb forms that are not finite verbs; they cannot serve as the root of an independent clause. Most nonfinite verbs found in English are infinitives, participles and gerunds. (They sometimes are called verbals, but that term has traditionally applied only to participles and gerunds.) Additional nonfinite forms found in some other languages include converbs, gerundives and supines.

Conjunction is a part of speech that connects words, phrases, or clauses that are called the conjuncts of the conjoining construction. The term discourse marker is mostly used for conjunctions joining sentences. This definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech, so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each language. In general, a conjunction is an invariable grammatical particle and it may or may not stand between the items in a conjunction. The definition may also be extended to idiomatic phrases that behave as a unit with the same function, e.g. "as well as", "provided that". Conjunctions may be placed at the beginning of sentences: "But some superstition about the practice persists". Because it was raining, we had to cancel the class picnic. The house was a mess after the crazy party we had last night. He didn't go skiing any more, since he had the accident. Her favorite colors were purple and red. He was late for school, so he took a shortcut. She doesn't like coffee, nor does she like tea. Grammar - Subordinate Clause.

Prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix un- is added to the word happy, it creates the word unhappy. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the words to which it is affixed. De as a prefix means to undo, reverse, remove or do the opposite.

Article is a word that is used alongside a noun (as a standalone word or a prefix or suffix) to specify grammatical definiteness of the noun, and in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in English grammar are the and a/an, and in certain contexts some. "An" and "a" are modern forms of the Old English "an", which in Anglian dialects was the number "one" (compare "on" in Saxon dialects) and survived into Modern Scots as the number "owan". Both "on" (respelled "one" by the Norman language) and "an" survived into Modern English, with "one" used as the number and "an" ("a", before nouns that begin with a consonant sound) as an indefinite article.

Suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. ful as a suffix means to be full of or having a quantity that would fill something named, like in the words helpful, thankful, plentiful, mouthful and cheerful.

Affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes. Affixations, the linguistic process speakers use form different words by adding morphemes (affixes) at the beginning (prefixation), the middle (infixation) or the end (suffixation) of words.

Infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word or the core of a family of words). It contrasts with adfix, a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem such as a prefix or suffix. When marking text for interlinear glossing, most affixes are separated with a hyphen but infixes are separated with (angle brackets).

Plural is used to denote two or of something or more than one of something, although they may also denote more than fractional, zero or negative amounts. An example of a plural is the English word cats, which corresponds to the singular cat

Part of Speech is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) which have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar behavior in terms of syntax—they play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentences—and sometimes in terms of morphology, in that they undergo inflection for similar properties. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, and sometimes numeral, article or determiner.

Subject is the person or thing about whom the statement is made, such as John runs, John is a teacher, or John was hit by a car. In this case 'John' is the subject. Traditionally the subject is the word or phrase which controls the verb in the clause, that is to say with which the verb agrees (John is but John and Mary are). If there is no verb, as in John - what an idiot!, or if the verb has a different subject, as in John - I can't stand him!, then 'John' is not considered to be the grammatical subject, but can be described as the 'topic' of the sentence.

Object in a sentence as the entity that is acted upon by the subject. There is thus a primary distinction between subjects and objects that is understood in terms of the action expressed by the verb, e.g. Tom studies grammar - Tom is the subject and grammar is the object. Noun - Subjective - Objective.

Infinitive is a grammatical term referring to certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is derived from Late Latin [modus] infinitivus, a derivative of infinitus meaning "unlimited".

Word Order is when different languages arrange words differently in a particular order. There are six theoretically possible basic word orders for the transitive sentence: subject–verb–object (SVO), subject–object–verb (SOV), verb–subject–object (VSO), verb–object–subject (VOS), object–subject–verb (OSV) and object–verb–subject (OVS). The overwhelming majority of the world's languages are either SVO or SOV, with a much smaller but still significant portion using VSO word order.

Syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, specifically word order. The term syntax is also used to refer to the study of such principles and processes.

Passive Voice is a grammatical voice common in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb – that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed. This contrasts with active voice, in which the subject has the agent role. For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject (the tree) denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences.

English Auxiliaries and Contractions is generally conceived as one with little semantic meaning of its own, which modifies the meaning of another verb with which it co-occurs. In English, verbs are often classed as auxiliaries on the basis of certain grammatical properties, particularly as regards their syntax – primarily whether they participate in subject–auxiliary inversion, and can be negated by the simple addition of not after them.

Regularization is a linguistic phenomenon observed in language acquisition, language development and language change typified by the replacement of irregular forms in morphology or syntax by regular ones. Examples are "gooses" instead of "geese" in child speech and replacement of the Middle English plural form for "cow", "kine", with "cows".  Regularization is a common process in natural languages; regularized forms can replace loanword forms (such as with "cows" and "kine") or coexist with them (such as with "formulae" and "formulas" or "hepatitides" and "hepatitises").

Participle is a form of a verb that is used in a sentence to modify a noun, noun phrase, verb, or verb phrase, and plays a role similar to an adjective or adverb. A simpler, but less comprehensive, definition is that it is a verbal adjective.

Conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar). Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, and/or other grammatical categories such as possession, definiteness, politeness, causativity, clusivity, interrogativity, transitivity, valency, polarity, telicity, volition, mirativity, evidentiality, associativity, pluractionality, agreement, polypersonal agreement, incorporation, noun class, noun classifiers, and verb classifiers in some languages.

Declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number (at least singular and plural), case (nominative or subjective, genitive or possessive, etc.), and gender. A declension is also a group of nouns that follow a particular pattern of inflection.

Ablative is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns and adjectives in the grammar of various languages; it is sometimes used to express motion away from something, among other uses.

Aorist verb forms usually express perfective aspect and refer to past events, similar to a preterite. Ancient Greek grammar had the aorist form, and the grammars of other Indo-European languages and languages influenced by the Indo-European grammatical tradition, such as Middle Persian, Sanskrit, Armenian, the South Slavic languages, and Georgian also have forms referred to as aorist.

Vowels - Constants - Phonics

Alliteration is a stylistic literary device identified by the repeated sound of the first letter in a series of multiple words, or the repetition of the same letter sounds in stressed syllables of a phrase. "Alliteration" is from the Latin word littera, meaning "letter of the alphabet", and the first known use of the word to refer to a literary device occurred around 1624. Alliteration narrowly refers to the repetition of a letter in any syllables that, according to the poem's meter, are stressed, as in James Thomson's verse "Come…dragging the lazy languid Line along". Another example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers".

Contraction is a shortened version of the written and spoken forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds. In linguistic analysis, contractions should not be confused with crasis, abbreviations nor acronyms (including initialisms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in loose parlance. Contraction is also distinguished from clipping, where beginnings and endings are omitted.

A word is like compressed data. You can send the word instead of the whole definition of the word. Then the person who receives the word can then decompress the word by knowing its definition. (The brain unzips the file, or in this case the word, or words).

Spelling - Writing Tips

E-Books - Digitized Books - Audio Books

Sight - Seeing - Languages

Dictionary is a reference book containing an alphabetical list of words with information and definitions.

Dictionaries - Meaning

With so many words, it makes sense to know Which words are the most important, How many words do you need to know? How do you measure how many words you know? 20,000 effective words in your vocabulary would be the minimum. Comprehension.

Vocabulary - Words you Know

Vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the largest challenges in learning a second language.

Lexicon is the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). "The Library of the Mind".

There are currently around 1,009,614 words in the English Language including thousands of obsolete words and transition words.

It's not just the size of your vocabulary that counts, but more importantly, it's the quality of words that you have in your vocabulary and your ability to use those words effectively and efficiently, to communicate and too analyzing messages for accuracy. Comprehension.

The Power of Words (sometimes powerless) - Core Vocabulary

The average person knows an average of about 5,000 - 20,000 words in their vocabulary, which varies depending on their level of education, their spoken language and their environment. In 1950 the average 14-year-old had a vocabulary of 25,000 words. By 1999, the average 14-year-old's vocabulary had dropped to only 10,000 words. A college-educated speaker of English could have a vocabulary as large as 80,000 words. The biggest individual vocabulary found was 192,500 words. "Can most adults quickly and effortlessly recall as many as 100,000 regularly used words when prompted?"

When starting to learn how to read and write, you should learn words that are relevant to your everyday life. 

If you make reading one of your priorities, and read the most important knowledge, your vocabulary should increase a few words a day. This should happen your entire life, but sadly to many adults stop learning new words, which puts the at a disadvantage and makes adults vulnerable to propaganda. 2 people can read the same thing and have 2 different opinions.

Most vocabulary tests are flawed because they don't use the most effective words we have. 

What good is having a large vocabulary of words if the words are obsolete or ineffective?

Children's Vocabulary Differences related to the Process of Word Learning. The nation's 31 million children growing up in homes with low socioeconomic status have, on average, significantly smaller vocabularies compared with their peers.

My Vocabulary Size - Measure Vocabulary Size

Rhymes with Reason is an interactive educational tool that facilitates vocabulary acquisition through hip-hop lyrics. Hip Hop Education

Comprehension - Languages - Word Knowledge - The Word - Words - Word Matrix - Dictionaries - Meanings

Most Common Words in English (wiki) - 200 Words - 500 Words

History of the English Language - List of English words of Sanskrit origin (wiki)

Vocabulary Lessons - Vocabulary Software

Measure your students’ Vocabulary Size - Test Your Vocab - How many English words do you know? Scots have 421 words for snow. Meanings.

The words in the BK101 Website will make up the rest of your 50,000 word vocabulary.

Word Games - Playing with Words

Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts.

Everyone should learn a new word everyday. The ‘Word of the Day’ will be used in 3 sentences. And each sentence used will have more meaning then the word itself. The sentences used will also have lessons involved so you are not just learning the meaning of a word, you are also learning why that particular word is used, and why that particular sentence needs that word and learning what the sentence means as a whole, whether it's a quote or passage from a book. 

Word Play is a literary technique and a form of wit in which the words that are used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement. Examples of word play include puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, double entendres, and telling character names (such as in the play The Importance of Being Earnest, Ernest being a given name that sounds exactly like the adjective earnest).

Try to use words that matter, words that are known to be valuable and are know to increase your understanding and your awareness.

Inspirational Words - Media Words - Mental Health Words - Physical Health Words - Poetry - The Word - Educational Games - Word Counting - Figure of Speech

Charades is a word guessing game. Originally, the game was a dramatic form of literary charades: a single person would act out each syllable of a word or phrase in order, followed by the whole phrase together, while the rest of the group guessed. A variant was to have teams who acted scenes out together while the others guessed. Today, it is common to require the actors to mime their hints without using any spoken words, which requires some conventional gestures. Puns and visual puns were and remain common.

Taboo is a word guessing party game where the objective of the game is for a player to have their partners guess the word on the player's card without using the word itself or five additional words listed on the card. The game was published by Parker Brothers in 1989 and subsequently purchased by Hasbro.

Say the definition of a word instead using just the word itself. Describe the meaning of the word instead of saying the word.

Games with Words - Word Think - Word Smith - Word Masters Challenge - Catch Phrase - Pictionary

Guessing Game is a game in which the object is to use guessing to discover some kind of information, such as a word, a phrase, a title, or the identity or location of an object. A guessing game has as its core a piece of information that one player knows, and the object is to coerce others into guessing that piece of information without actually divulging it in text or spoken word.

Word Association is a common word game involving an exchange of words that are associated together. The game is based on the noun phrase word association, meaning "stimulation of an associative pattern by a word" or "the connection and production of other words in response to a given word, done spontaneously as a game, creative technique, or in a psychiatric evaluation."

Watch Out 4 Snakes - Words Play - Word of the Day - Word of the Day - Super Kids - Word Nik - WWW - Wordmaker - Power word - Word Finder - Word Cloud Generator

Categories is a word game where players attempt to list words that fit into particular categories, all starting with the same letter. Players start by deciding on a list of categories between them, such as "town" or "actor", and each writing that list on a sheet of paper. A letter of the alphabet is then chosen at random, and players have a set amount of time to write something for each category that starts with that letter.

Pun is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. Puns.

Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with that thing or concept.

True Name is a name of a thing or being that expresses, or is somehow identical to, its true nature.

Ineffability is the quality of something that surpasses the capacity of language to express it. Something that is undescribable, or something that defies expression or description.

Eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms).

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. By extension, the term "the etymology (of a word)" means the origin of the particular word.

Brain Games - Word Twist - Crosswords - Crossword Puzzles - Algorithm - Crossword Grid - Crossword Solver

Anagram is direct word switch or word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; for example, the word anagram can be rearranged into nag-a-ram. Someone who creates anagrams may be called an "anagrammatist". The original word or phrase is known as the subject of the anagram. Anagrams are often used as a form of mnemonic device as well. Any word or phrase that exactly reproduces the letters in another order is an anagram. However, the goal of serious or skilled anagrammatists is to produce anagrams that in some way reflect or comment on the subject. Antonyms.

Palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward, such as madam or racecar. Sentence-length palindromes may be written when allowances are made for adjustments to capital letters, punctuation, and word dividers, such as "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!", "Was it a car or a cat I saw?" or "No 'x' in Nixon".

Boggle is a word game played using a plastic grid of lettered dice, in which players attempt to find words in sequences of adjacent letters.

Boggle Bash - Words Domination - Learning Games - Memory Games - Twenty Questions (PDF) - Questions

"I love words. Words can be so wonderful. I couldn't imagine a world without words."

What are words for when no one listens anymore? Missing Persons - Words (youtube)

Tongue-Twister is a phrase that is designed to be difficult to articulate properly, and can be used as a type of spoken (or sung) word game. Some tongue-twisters produce results that are humorous (or humorously vulgar) when they are mispronounced, while others simply rely on the confusion and mistakes of the speaker for their amusement value. 70 People Try 70 Tongue-Twisters From 70 Countries | Condé Nast Traveler (youtube)

Literacy - Ability to Read and Write

Literacy is the ability to read and write and to write with accuracy and coherence and to use information and insights from text as the basis for informed decisions and creative thought. Literacy is also the ability to use language, numbers, images, computers, and other basic means to understand, communicate, gain useful knowledge, solve mathematical problems and use the dominant symbol systems of a culture. Literacy are the skills used to access knowledge through technology and the ability to assess complex contexts. The key to literacy is reading development and a progression of skills which begins with the ability to understand spoken words and decode written words, and which culminates in the deep understanding of text. Reading development involves a range of complex language-underpinnings including awareness of speech sounds or phonology, spelling patterns or orthography, word meaning or semantics, grammar or syntax and patterns of word formation or morphology, all of which provide a necessary platform for reading fluency and comprehension. Once these skills are acquired, a reader can attain full language literacy, which includes the abilities to apply to printed material critical analysis, inference and synthesis. The inability to read and write is called illiteracy or analphabetism.

40% OF WORLD'S CHILDREN CAN'T READ: At least 250 million of the world's 650 million primary school age children are unable to read, write or do basic mathematics, almost 120 million have spent little or no time in a classroom including 57 million youngsters who are not attending school. Percentages of Africans who can Read (image) - More.

35 million U.S. adults reading skills are below a fourth-grade level. 1 in 6 U.S. adults. More Stats.

130 million American adults have low literacy skills with 54% of people 16-74 below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

High-income families are being exposed too 30 million more words than children from families on welfare, which seems catastrophic, but if the extra words in your vocabulary are never used effectively and efficiently, then extra words in your vocabulary will only give you a little more potential. You have to define the most important words, and then you have to learn how to use them effectively and efficiently.

Thirty Million Words - Learning to read boosts the visual brain.

Literacy Resources - Pro Literacy - Family Literacy - Literacy Programs - Literacy Collaborative - Literacy Center - Literacy and Technology

LINCS Literacy Information and Communication System.

Vocabulary Tools (mouse over items and hear recorded pronunciation)

High school students today are reading books intended for children with reading levels around 5.3, which is barely above the fifth grade reading level. It's criminal and abusive. How do you accurately measure fluency or comprehension?

Learning pathways could guide children who miss best start to improved literacy by age 11. A study of 7,000 children shows that the early talk and communication experienced when very young, while essential preparation for school, does not directly impact on literacy skills by age 11. Although talking, reading, or singing to a young child is very important, children who experience this less - typically those from less-advantaged backgrounds - need not be permanently disadvantaged. By targeting specific learning pathways, they could be helped to catch up with their more fortunate peers. The importance of children's Early Language and Communication Environment is widely acknowledged in research and policy. It refers to how much parents and caregivers talk, read, sing and play with very young children, to the quality of that engagement, and to children's access to resources like books and toys.

Parents need better support to develop digital literacies for themselves and their children. Parents should be taught how to better understand the increasingly volatile social media landscape that is deploying sophisticated algorithms. According to a study, there are four distinct patterns of how parents understand social media algorithms: Misunderstandings: Parents held mistaken assumptions about how an algorithm works. For example, one parent struggled to comprehend YouTube content recommendations for her son, mistakenly linking them to subscriptions. Parked understandings: Parents possessed an awareness of algorithms but felt their concerns could be deferred for when their child was older -- labeling it as a 'future issue'. Transactional understandings: Some parents accepted algorithms' influence as part of modern life. Some parents used child filters but felt resigned to the role of algorithms. Proactive understandings: Parents took immediate action to address algorithmic impacts. For example, a parent in the study actively monitored YouTube recommendations for his son to flag inappropriate content.

Book Types - Printing Materials

Book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials, fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is a leaf, and each side of a leaf is a page. A set of text-filled or illustrated pages.

Interface - E-Books - History - Printing Press

Chapter Book is a story book intended for intermediate readers, generally age 7–10. Unlike picture books for beginning readers, a chapter book tells the story primarily through prose, rather than pictures. Unlike books for advanced readers, chapter books contain plentiful illustrations. The name refers to the fact that the stories are usually divided into short chapters, which provide readers with opportunities to stop and resume reading if their attention spans are not long enough to finish the book in one sitting. Chapter books are usually works of fiction of moderate length and complexity.

Textbook is a book containing a compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions. Schoolbooks are textbooks and other books used in schools. Today, many textbooks are published in both print format and digital formats. School Textbooks can also be propaganda that is produced by corporate or religious controlled institutions. These textbooks are designed for assimilation or indoctrination purposes. Encyclopedias.

Text are the words of something written. The main body of a written work. A book prepared for use in schools or colleges. A passage from the Bible that is used as the subject of a sermon. Text can also mean a short text message sent between mobile phones or other electronic devices

Exercise Book or Composition Book is a notebook that is used in schools to copy down schoolwork and notes. A student will usually have a different exercise book for each separate lesson or subject. Exercise books may act as a primary record of students' learning efforts. Homework.

Notebook is a small book or binder of paper pages, often ruled, used for purposes such as recording notes or memoranda, writing, drawing or scrapbooking. Sketch.

Note is a brief record of facts, topics, or thoughts, written down as an aid to memory or to perceive with the mind. A short informal or personal letter or written message. A record of something in writing to pay particular attention to.

Logbook is an official record of events during the voyage of a ship or aircraft. It can also be a record used to record states, events, or conditions applicable to complex machines or the personnel who operate them. The logbook creates a systematic way of managing cases. The logbook ensures all required information is recorded in a logical manner. The logbook keeps the information in one place including supporting documents.

Lab Notebook is a primary record of research. Researchers use a lab notebook to document their hypotheses, experiments and initial analysis or interpretation of these experiments. The notebook serves as an organizational tool, a memory aid, and can also have a role in protecting any intellectual property that comes from the research.

Field Notes refer to qualitative notes recorded by scientists or researchers in the course of field research, during or after their observation of a specific organism or phenomenon they are studying.

Document Writing - Information

Commonplace Book is a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they have learned. Each commonplace book is unique to its creator's particular interests. They became significant in Early Modern Europe. Philosophy.

Diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comments on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone who keeps a diary is known as a diarist. Diaries undertaken for institutional purposes play a role in many aspects of human civilization, including government records (e.g. Hansard), business ledgers and military records. In British English, the word may also denote a preprinted journal format. (originally in handwritten format). Writing your thoughts down can help you to visualize your thoughts, and written words can also help connect you to your thoughts. When you write, the thought is not just in your head anymore, the thought is materialized using language and a solid medium. Now that you have written your thoughts down, your thoughts can be analyzed and your thoughts can be rewritten if needed.

Epigram - Sayings - Old Memories - Document - Report

Writing down your feelings on paper after being insulted, and then getting rid of the note or shredding it or throwing it away, reduces anger. Disposing of a piece of paper containing your written thoughts on the cause of your anger can effectively neutralize it. This process is like a Japanese tradition called hakidashisara, in which people write their negative thoughts on a plate then destroy it. Their findings suggest a simple and effective method of suppressing anger supported by science. Impermanence.

Journal is a daily record of events or business; a private journal is usually referred to as a diary. Journaling - Dreams.

Biography is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae or résumé, a biography presents a subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of the subject's personality. Biography is an account of the series of events making up a person's life. Biopic is a biographical movie dramatizing the life of a particular person, typically a public or historical figure.

Autobiography is a written account of the life of a person written by that person. In other words, it is the story that a person wrote about themselves.

Narrative - What if Your Life was made into a Movie? - POV

Memoir is a historical account of an author's personal experiences, or a biography written from personal knowledge or from special sources. A nonfiction narrative writing based in the author's personal memories. An essay on a learned subject or based on a scientific or scholarly topic.

Picture Book combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format, most often aimed at young children. With the narrative told primarily through text, they are distinct from comics, which do so primarily through sequential images. The images in picture books are commonly produced in a range of media, such as oil paints, acrylics, watercolor, and pencil, among others.

Art Journaling is a visual diary and record keeping combined with creativity. It's a place to record your thoughts, memories, and emotions through images, art and words. Digital Art Journaling is using a computer program like Photoshop to create journal pages.

Scrapbooking is a method, an art for preserving, presenting, arranging personal and family history in the form of a book, box, card. Typical memorabilia include photographs, printed media, and artwork. Scrapbook albums are often decorated and frequently contain extensive journaling. Scrapbooking is a hobby commonly practiced in many parts of the world.

Literacy - Writing Tips and Styles - Meaning - Bibliography - Bibliophilic

Novel is a long narrative, normally in prose, which describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story.

Graphic Novel is a book made up of comics content. Although the word "novel" normally refers to long fictional works, the term "graphic novel" is applied broadly and includes fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work. It is distinguished from the term "comic book", which is used for comics periodicals.

Letter is one person's written message to another pertaining to some matter of common concern. Letters have several different types: Formal letters and informal letters. Letters contribute to the protection and conservation of literacy. Letters have been sent since antiquity and are mentioned in the Iliad. Both Herodotus and Thucydides mention letters in their histories.

Open Letter - Epistolary Poem.

Summary is a brief summary of a research article, thesis, review, conference proceeding or any in-depth analysis of a particular subject and is often used to help the reader quickly ascertain the paper's purpose. When used, an abstract always appears at the beginning of a manuscript or typescript, acting as the point-of-entry for any given academic paper or patent application. Abstracting and indexing services for various academic disciplines are aimed at compiling a body of literature for that particular subject. Essay - Document Writing.

Vignette is a brief literary description. A small illustrative sketch (as sometimes placed at the beginning of chapters in books). A photograph whose edges shade off gradually.

Manuscript is any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to being mechanically printed or reproduced in some automated way. More recently, it is understood to be an author's written, typed, or word-processed copy of a work, as distinguished from the print of the same. Printing History.

Publishing is the business of issuing printed matter for sale or distribution. Put into print and prepare and issue for public distribution or sale. Dissemination.

Publication is a copy of a printed work offered for distribution. The act of issuing printed materials. The communication of something to the public and making information generally known.

Scroll is a roll of papyrus, parchment, or paper containing writing, which became popular around the 1st century AD. A scroll is usually divided up into pages, which are sometimes separate sheets of papyrus or parchment glued together at the edges, or may be marked divisions of a continuous roll of writing material. The scroll is usually unrolled so that one page is exposed at a time, for writing or reading, with the remaining pages rolled up to the left and right of the visible page. It is unrolled from side to side, and the text is written in lines from the top to the bottom of the page. Depending on the language, the letters may be written left to right, right to left, or alternating in direction (boustrophedon). Some scrolls are simply rolled up pages; others may have wooden rollers on each end: Torah scrolls have rather elaborate rollers befitting their ceremonial function. Scrolling - Scanning.

Literary is any single body of written works. More restrictively, it is writing considered as an art form, or any single writing deemed to have artistic or intellectual value, often due to deploying language in ways that differ from ordinary usage.

Literature is any body of written works. More restrictively, literature refers to writing considered to be an art form or any single writing deemed to have artistic or intellectual value, often due to deploying language in ways that differ from ordinary usage.

Literary Agent is an agent who represents writers and their written works to publishers, theatrical producers, film producers, and film studios, and assists in the sale and deal negotiation of the same. Literary agents most often represent novelists, screenwriters, and non-fiction writers. They are paid a fixed percentage (usually twenty percent on foreign sales and ten to fifteen percent for domestic sales) of the proceeds of sales they negotiate on behalf of their clients.

Literary Genre is a category of literary composition. Genres may be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or even (as in the case of fiction) length. The distinctions between genres and categories are flexible and loosely defined, often with subgroups. Philosophy.

Visual Literacy is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image, extending the meaning of literacy, which commonly signifies interpretation of a written or printed text. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be “read” and that meaning can be through a process of reading. Logos.

Flip Book is a book with a series of pictures that vary gradually from one page to the next, so that when the pages are turned rapidly, the pictures appear to animate by simulating motion or some other change.

Info-Graph - Spatial Intelligence

Comics is a medium used to express ideas by images, often combined with text or other visual information. Comics frequently takes the form of juxtaposed sequences of panels of images. Often textual devices such as speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia indicate dialogue, narration, sound effects, or other information. Size and arrangement of panels contribute to narrative pacing.

"I sometimes hesitant when reading particular comic books, this is because some of them may not be so funny. I just don't like wasting time reading something useless." Humor (cartoons).

Play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. Plays are performed at a variety of levels, from Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional theater, to Community theatre, as well as University or school productions. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference whether their plays were performed or read. The term "play" can refer to both the written works of playwrights and to their complete theatrical performance.

Movies - Stories

Screenplay is a written work by screenwriters for a film, video game, or television program. These screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated. A screenplay written for television is also known as a teleplay.

Exposition is the insertion of important background information within a story; for example, information about the setting, characters' backstories, prior plot events, historical context, etc. In a specifically literary context, exposition appears in the form of expository writing embedded within the narrative. Exposition is one of four rhetorical modes (also known as modes of discourse), along with description, argumentation, and narration, as elucidated by Alexander Bain and John Genung. Each of the rhetorical modes is present in a variety of forms, and each has its own purpose and conventions. There are several ways to accomplish exposition.

Script is something written by hand that describes a play, dramatic composition or performance.

Human Interest Story is a feature story that discusses a person, or people, or a companion animal in an emotional way. It presents people and their problems, concerns, or achievements in a way that brings about interest, sympathy or motivation in the reader or viewer.

News Papers - Journalism - Public Interest

Article in publishing is a written work published in a print or electronic medium. It may be for the purpose of propagating news, research results, academic analysis, or debate. An article is a nonfictional or fictional prose forming an independent part of a publication.

Disseminate - Communication - Essay - Research Papers

Report is to give an account or representation of in words. A written Document describing the findings of some individual or group. Announce as the result of an investigation or experience or finding.

Documents - Wikipedia - Research Papers - Journals - Websites - Books

Volume is a book forming part of a work or series that provides information about something.

Blog is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries ("posts").

PDF is a file format used to present documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it. (PDF stands for Portable Document Format).

Flyer is a form of paper advertisement intended for wide distribution and typically posted or distributed in a public place, handed out to individuals or sent through the mail. In the 2010s, flyers range from inexpensively photocopied leaflets to expensive, glossy, full-color circulars. A flyer is also called a "flier", "circular", "handbill", "pamphlet", "poster", "lit'" (literature), "weekly ad", "catalogue" or "leaflet".

Folded Leaflet are usually used for advertising or marketing purposes, or for information supplementary to labels. There are many types of folds. Although it is difficult to put a date on when some of these folds were first used, it is evident that their popularity boomed when the first mass production printers were introduced.

Brochure is an informative paper document that can be folded into a template, pamphlet or leaflet. A brochure can also be a set of related unfolded papers put into a pocket folder or packet. Brochures are promotional documents, primarily used to introduce a company, organization, products or services and inform prospective customers or members of the public of the benefits. Brochures are distributed in many different ways: as newspaper inserts, handed out personally, by mail or placed in brochure racks in high traffic locations especially in tourist precincts. They may be considered as grey literature. A brochure is usually folded and only includes summary information that is promotional in character. A booklet is usually several sheets of paper with a cardstock cover and bound with staples, string or plastic binding. In contrast, a single piece of unfolded paper is usually called an insert, flyer or bulletin.

Newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events. News Papers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sports and art, and often include materials such as opinion columns, weather forecasts, reviews of local services, obituaries, birth notices, crosswords, editorial cartoons, comic strips, and advice columns. Most newspapers are businesses, and they pay their expenses with a mixture of subscription revenue, newsstand sales, and advertising revenue. The journalism organizations that publish newspapers are themselves often metonymically called newspapers. Newspapers have traditionally been published in print (usually on cheap, low-grade paper called newsprint). However, today most newspapers are also published on websites as online newspapers, and some have even abandoned their print versions entirely. Newspapers developed in the 17th century, as information sheets for businessmen. By the early 19th century, many cities in Europe, as well as North and South America, published newspapers. Some newspapers with high editorial independence, high journalism quality, and large circulation are viewed as newspapers of record. Printing Press.

Magazine is a publication, usually a periodical publication, which is printed or electronically published as an online magazine. The root word "magazine" refers to a collection or storage location. In the case of written publication, it is a collection of written articles.

Mail or Post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letters, and parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid-19th century, national postal systems have generally been established as a government monopoly, with a fee on the article prepaid. Proof of payment is usually in the form of an adhesive postage stamp, but a postage meter is also used for bulk mailing. With the advent of email, the retronym "snail mail" was coined. Postal authorities often have functions aside from transporting letters. In some countries, a postal, telegraph and telephone service oversees the postal system, in addition to telephone and telegraph systems. Some countries' postal systems allow for savings accounts and handle applications for passports. The Universal Postal Union (UPU), established in 1874, includes 192 member countries and sets the rules for international mail exchanges.

Postcard or post card is a piece of thick paper or thin cardboard, typically rectangular, intended for writing and mailing without an envelope.

Digital Text Books - Electronic Books - eBooks - Online Books

E-book is an electronic book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Although sometimes defined as "an electronic version of a printed book", some e-books exist without a printed equivalent. Commercially produced and sold e-books are usually intended to be read on dedicated e-reader devices. However, almost any sophisticated computer device that features a controllable viewing screen can also be used to read e-books, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Electronic Text is a general term for any document that is read in digital form, and especially a document that is mainly text. For example, a computer based book of art with minimal text, or a set of photographs or scans of pages, would not usually be called an "e-text". The term is usually synonymous with e-book. An e-text may be a binary or a plain text file, viewed with any open source or proprietary software. An e-text may have markup or other formatting information, or not. An e-text may be an electronic edition of a work originally composed or published in other media, or may be created in electronic form originally.

Email is a method of exchanging messages or mail between people using electronic devices. Email entered limited use in the 1960s, but users could only send to users of the same computer. Some systems also supported a form of instant messaging, where sender and receiver needed to be online simultaneously.

Scrolling is sliding text, images or video across a monitor or display, vertically or horizontally. "Scrolling", as such, does not change the layout of the text or pictures, but moves (pans or tilts) the user's view across what is apparently a larger image that is not wholly seen. A common television and movie special effect is to scroll credits, while leaving the background stationary. Scrolling may take place completely without user intervention (as in film credits) or, on an interactive device, be triggered by touchscreen or a keypress and continue without further intervention until a further user action, or be entirely controlled by input devices. Scrolling may take place in discrete increments (perhaps one or a few lines of text at a time), or continuously (smooth scrolling). Frame Rate is the speed at which an entire image is redisplayed. It is related to scrolling in that changes to text and image position can only happen as often as the image can be redisplayed. When frame rate is a limiting factor, one smooth scrolling technique is to blur images during movement that would otherwise appear to "jump".

Project Gutenberg - Digital Public Library

E Books Store - Google E-Books - Kindle eBooks (amazon)

Overdrive app, thousands of eBooks, audiobooks, and videos from your local library.

E-book (book types) - E books - E Pub Books

Mike Matas Interactive E-Books (youtube)

Push Pop Press Next Generation Digital Books

I Pad Education
Dynamic Books
Light and Matter
Online Bookshop
Informa World
Edu Place
Worldbook - World Book Online
Barnes & Noble
National Academies Press
McGraw Hill - McGraw Hill Elementary Books
Fiction Press
Adobe Digital Editions

Open Source Content

Digital Content is any content that exists in the form of digital data. Also known as digital media, digital content is stored on digital or analog storage in specific formats. Forms of digital content include information that is digitally broadcast, streamed, or contained in computer files. Viewed narrowly, digital content includes popular media types, while a broader approach considers any type of digital information (e. g. digitally updated weather forecasts, GPS maps, and so on) as digital content. Digital content has increased as more households have accessed the Internet. Increased access has made it easier for people to receive their news and watch TV online, challenging the popularity of traditional platforms. Increased access to the Internet has also led to the mass publication of digital content through individuals in the form of eBooks, blog posts, and even Facebook posts.
Web Content is the textual, visual, or aural content that is encountered as part of the user experience on websites. It may include—among other things—text, images, sounds, videos, and animations.

Content Format is an encoded format for converting a specific type of data to displayable information.

Audio Books

Audiobook is a recording of a book or other work being read out loud. A reading of the complete text is described as "unabridged", while readings of a shorter version are an abridgement.

Audible Books - Audio Books - Audio Books

Emic 2 Text-to-Speech Module - Learn out Loud 

Audio Books (youtube Channel)

Hearing (ears) - Lectures

Can listening to audiobooks at a faster speed, 150 or 200 percent, increase comprehension?

Speed Listening - Speed Reading - Fast Writing

Open Library - Iee Explore Digital Library

Perfection Learning

Reading Comprehension - What is Propaganda?

Ted Videos - Documentaries - Youtube Videos - Movies - Daily Show - Sports

Text Books - Old text Books - Rent or Reuse Books

Textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions. Schoolbooks are textbooks and other books used in schools. Today, many textbooks are published in both print format and digital formats.

Buy and Sell Old Text Books
Remixable Textbooks Online or Off
Used Text Books
Rent Textbooks
College Book Renter
College Open Textbooks
Academic Superstore
Vital Source
Book Trade 
Book Finder
Cambridge Press
Paper Spine
Book Swim

Make Your Own Text Books or Photo Books.

Course Smart was a provider of e-textbooks and digital course materials. It was acquired by Ingram Content Group subsidiary VitalSource Technologies in early 2014, and was integrated into the parent company under the VitalSource name and platform by 2016.

The Academic Library - Mendeley

Open Source Curriculum - Crowd Source Research Library - Organize Research and Share - Public Zero Publications

Library Locations - Inspirational Books - Popular Books to Read - Plagiarism - Copyright Info - Information Resources - News Resources

Lumière: Eye Protection Lamp you take anywhere, Cordless, Simple and 360º Adjustable.

Hornbook is a book that serves as a primer for study.

Frontiers is a community-rooted, open-access academic publisher. Our grand vision is to build an Open Science platform where everybody has equal opportunity to seek, share and generate knowledge, and that empowers researchers in their daily work.

Books about Reading and Writing

Literacy Assured: Integrating Language Arts with a New 3 R's, Relationships, Reasoning and Responsibility. The old Three R's stood for Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. More Books by Robert and Lois Wolsch.

How to Write, Speak and Think More Effectively by Rudolf Flesch who was an Austrian-born naturalized American writer (noted for his book Why Johnny Can't Read), and also a readability expert and writing consultant who was a vigorous proponent of plain English in the United States. He created the Flesch Reading Ease test and was co-creator of the Flesch–Kincaid readability tests. Flesch advocated use of phonics rather than sight reading to enable students to sound-out unfamiliar words.

Dimensions of Literacy is a conceptual base for teaching reading and writing in school settings - Paperback – April 20, 2009 (amazon)

Making Literacy Real are theories and practices for learning and teaching - Paperback – October 3, 2005 (amazon)

How to Teach Balanced Reading and Writing Paperback – May 16, 2006 (amazon)

Best Practices in Literacy Instruction - Third Edition Paperback – January 11, 2007 (amazon)

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I do not agree with everything that has been written in books

I absorb the most logical parts of information and then put them together to form an understanding. And then I write down my understandings so that I can share this information with others. Every person must learn how to recognize what information is accurate and valuable. You need some kind of a procedure for filtering and assimilating information.

Types of Text I Read the Most: News Articles, Reports, Documents, Wikipedia, Research Papers, Journals, Websites, Books, Blogs and PDF's.

Types of Videos I Watch the Most: Lectures, Ted Videos, Documentaries, Youtube Videos, Movies, Daily Show, Sports.

Be extremely aware of propaganda and ignorance on the Radio, on the TV, and in the News Papers and in Magazines.

Information Literacy

Try not to assume that certain words are directly meant for you until you are absolutely sure of the Audience to which those words were originally intended for.

Knowing how to read is like knowing how to walk. If you know how to walk, then why would you crawl around on your hands and knees? If you can read, then you read. You can't expect to learn and become more intelligent without reading. Get off your knees and start reading. You have unlimited potential, you either use it or lose it. It's like being in the cockpit of an airplane, if you never learn how to read the instruments, then you will never have the freedom to fly and explore the world on your own terms.

Everything hinges on knowing how to Read. From there, everything hinges on having access to highest quality knowledge available. From there, everything hinges on learning and continually progressing. From there, everything hinges on everything. Because everything is Cause and Effect, and everything is connected.

Knowing how to read is one of the most important skills to have in your life. But just knowing how to read is not enough. You need to know a lot of good words and know how to use words effectively.

When using a dictionary, sometimes you have to know the meaning of several different words in order to understand that particular word and its meaning. To express an idea you have to use your words accurately and effectively, especially if you want your message understood in the way you intended.

Words can have several different meanings. It's how the word is used in a sentence or they way it is spoken that helps to define the words meaning or message. This is called context. Context are the words that surrounds other words that helps to determine the meaning of the word and the interpretation of the message. Even the tone of a word can change it's meaning. A message can only be accurate if the person knows how to use words correctly, and is also not trying to manipulate you or confuse you.

Context is the set of facts or circumstances that surround a situation or event. Information that helps explain the meaning and the reasons.

You need to have a big vocabulary. There is a big difference between knowing a 1000 words and knowing 50,000 words. Words have power, but you have to learn how to use words, and you have to have a lot of words, and know word meanings and uses.

The power of knowledge has not yet been realized. We have documented all the advancements that came form language over the last 500 years, but most people have only been alive for the last fifty years, and so have no clear understanding of these advances, or the power of language. Reading and language is way beyond what you think it is. You can see more, understand more, have more potential and have more abilities.

It's not just knowing how to read a lot of words, you have to understand the meanings of words and how to use words effectively and efficiently. You have to be able to assemble words to express complex information. And you have to be able to not get fooled or manipulated by other peoples words. So you need to be aware of false information. and know how to correct errors in information. This will make you better at expressing your own information more accurately.

Once this is realized, it's a game changer. The worlds physical appearance will still look the same in a lot of ways, but when people become more knowledgeable, people will experience life in the most amazing ways ever dreamed of, or even imagined. Even your dreams during sleep will improve, along with most everything else.

All the things that you thought you knew about life, are going to blow your mind, as if most everything was a lie. But don't feel bad, your journey is just beginning.

If you don't continually educate yourself, no matter what you believe, it will never be enough. If you stop asking questions and stop learning, then you never find the answers. And if you live a life with too many unanswered questions, then your life will be riddled with doubt, instead of certainty and consistency.

It's not just having knowledge, it's also having everything that makes knowledge possible, like language, information, words, symbols, meanings, uses and instructions. You have to master all these things in order to extract the full power of knowledge and language.

Knowledge is the Key to the Universe.

Electricity changed the world. And the realization of language and knowledge will also change the world.

Most people today have no idea what electricity has done for human civilization. But most of our electrical energy is being wasted and abuse.

Technologies are being used to enslave people, physically and mentally. Technologies are supposed to free people and liberate people, not used to enslave people.

And our most important technology is language, which was also designed to free people and liberate people, and not used to enslave people. And slaves are being born into slavery.

Language and knowledge is the control panel of the universe. The key within a key that unlocks everything that has been locked away from you and unseen, all because of your lack of knowledge.

There's nothing to compare it to.

Don't limit your future to one lifetime. A lot of things are not going to happen in your lifetime. So you must look beyond your lifetime. Some things that you do in life will be for future generations. Just like the 100 billion people who have lived before you. Things did not happen in their lifetime either.

So you see, a lot of things are not going to happen in your lifetime. It was never about one lifetime, how boring would that be. One lifetime would totally suck. But if you don't make improvements in this lifetime, then the next lifetime, you are going to have even more problems.

The more words people have in their vocabulary, and the more they understand the meanings of words, and the more skill they have with using words to transmit information, or too express ideas, then the more power people will have.

Books that Schools want you to Read, But Why?

Most Read Books by High School Students (inspirational books)






BEACH BOOKS: 2014-2016: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class? (pdf) - Open Syllabus Project.