Words

How did ‘Scrabble’'s makers decide how many points each letter was worth? It started with an unemployed architect during the Great Depression, and it has stayed the same ever since.

The inventor of Scrabble was inspired by 'The Raven' author.

The game wouldn't exist if not for a minor plot point in a nearly two-century-old story.

Add these double-letter words to your player vocabulary to take advantage of the multiples on your tile rack.

You can flout these rules, but you can't flaunt them.

Roughly 288 populated places in the U.S. bear this name. Good thing we have zip codes.

Flip through the dictionary and you'll find all sorts of words hiding their bodily origins.

Some of our favorite words come from body parts. Scratch your 'caput' over the origins of these anatomically derived terms.

Behold: Denver Airport's 'Mustang' statue—or as Denverites call it, 'Blucifer.'

There are some very specific terms surrounding cow smells, elevation, and a sculpture that killed its own artist.

Nutella isn’t ‘Nut-tella,’ and other lies you’ve been told.

The phrase '86' may have originated in restaurants.

There are a few schools of thought. Some have more legs than others—such as those of the restaurant industry—but to this day, there is still no official etymology. Here are a few possibilities.

Orange you glad we're going to tell you what word rhymes with orange?

Stop the presses—there is a rhyme for orange, and for purple. You just have to get creative (and maybe a little scientific).

A word for sudden pain was made by reversing the word 'hooray.'

From allerednic to yob, these ananyms and semi-ananyms have backed their way into the dictionary.

Don't worry—you're not the only one who finds the definitions of these words hard to remember.

Sometimes there are words that you've seen, read, and maybe even used in conversation whose meaning you can never keep straight.

Work these greetings into conversations.

Why be boring when there are so many other ways to greet a person and forge a unique connection?

The Oxford English Dictionary is here to help you learn the nuanced meaning of ‘deepfake.’

Googling how to spell ‘restaurant’ is nothing to be ashamed of.

'Equity' and 'equality' are not quite the same.

The dictionary definition of ‘equity’ seems similar to that of ‘equality,’ but there’s an important distinction between the two.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, James Joyce, and Charlotte Bronte all used 'literally' in a figurative sense.

From Austen to Dickens and beyond, famous authors have had no problem with using the word 'literally' in a figurative sense.

If someone were to mention the word 'Fartulum' to you, a snail probably wouldn't be the first thing that came to mind.

Perfectly innocent Latin or Greekisms that just happen to sound like something else.

Silent letters are a clue to how words entered English.

Silent letters are the scourge of spellers and a stumbling block when learning how to write in English—but they're often hidden remnants of how the words passed through different languages on their way to English.