A geographical term from the 2025 Scripps Spelling Bee: Hoofddorp, a commune in the western part of the Netherlands. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Hoofddorp” I have to say one of my favorite new words that I’ve...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski is puzzling over demonyms, those names people who reside in a particular area. For example, someone who lives in Brooklyn, New York, is a Brooklynite. People who live in Boston, Massachusetts, are called Bostonians, but what...
Yolanda from San Antonio, a native of the Netherlands, wonders whether going Dutch, meaning that each person pays their own way, implies that Dutch people are cheap. The phrase belongs to a cluster of English expressions that cast the Dutch in an...
Twin Peaks approach n.— «It was influenced by what is known in regulatory circles as the Twin Peaks approach, used in Australia and the Netherlands. The idea is to create two financial regulators that are given separate responsibilities...
foodprint n.— «We also had this workshop at school today, about the environment en bioindustry and stuff. It was quite interesting, amazingly. We had to see how much we ate, out “foodprint” or something. How much square...
woonerf n.— «Those plans, rooted as much in philosophy as in design, draw inspiration from an item with the unlikely name of woonerfs (Dutch for “living streets”). Woonerfs are traffic systems in the Netherlands that seek to sand away the...