LANGUAGE

Tiger, moon, and buttonhole are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to words you probably didn’t know could be used as verbs—so why not try dropping some of these into conversation?

English number words are pretty logical for the most part, but eleven and twelve really don’t fit in at all.

Of all the king’s intellectual interests, however, his love of language was perhaps the most significant—and he may have once sent two infants to live on an island with a deaf-mute woman just to see what would happen.

Disease terminology can tell us a lot about the (sometimes-misguided) history of medicine.

The British have many delightful and colorful expressions that often make no sense to the rest of the world.

Many of the world’s currencies take their names from fairly predictable origins—like weights and measures or precious metals, for example—but the currency of Tonga, the pa‘anga, has a rather unusual history.

So easy, a robot can do it.

Lithium takes its name from the Greek word for “stone.”

Thanks to some hard-working scholars, Harry Potter, Winnie the Pooh, and Bilbo Baggins are now getting kids hooked on the language of Virgil.

A surprising number of common English food and beverage words have Arabic backgrounds.

A big night for the gender-neutral singular pronoun.

Love them or hate them, we all know what these figures are supposed to mean.