The names of several familiar foods come to us from Nahautl, the language of the Aztecs. But cuisine is not the only source of English words with an Aztec background.... READ ON

Chinese characters are made up of strokes. Learning to write them involves not only learning where all the strokes go, but also the order in which they are supposed to be written and the direction of each individual stroke (left to right, up to down, etc.) The most complex character, biáng, is made up of 57 strokes.... READ ON

What do you call a word that spells another word backwards or a word that looks the same upside down? When terms for these orthographic puzzlers didn’t exist, logolologists were happy to invent some. Here are a few.... READ ON

The symbols we use also have names: dollar sign, treble clef, asterisk, etc. But sometimes the name for a symbol takes on a different sort of meaning.... READ ON