WORDS

At first glance, a dictionary seems pretty straightforward: Words are listed alphabetically, and you simply locate the right page and scan until you find the word you’re looking for. But there’s a lot you might not know about these essential reference too

We know what we'll be doing tonight.

Bum crack and jabroni are now dictionary-official—and that's just the beginning.

Television can be a hotbed of creativity (or mediocrity, depending on who you ask). But it's not just characters and storylines writers are coming up with—they also coin words.

A world without Roald Dahl would be a world without Oompa Loompas, Snozzcumbers, or Muggle-Wumps. And who would ever want to live in a world like that?

The dictionary goes from aardvark to zozimus because "every dictionary has to start with aardvark; otherwise it would have to start with aback, which is just too boring."

A group of mathematicians at the University of Vermont published a paper on positivity in the English language.

They may have been on people’s tongues even earlier, but 1914 marks the earliest year the lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary could document these words and phrases in print.

Whether it's selling seashells by the seashore or buying Betty Botter's bitter butter, some of these difficult phrases go way back to when elocution was practiced as routinely as multiplication tables.

Winston Churchill had it down cold.

If there’s one thing wordplay aficionados like to mess around with, it’s the numerical value of the letters of the alphabet.

It may rankle purists, but American English isn’t the culprit.