WORDS

From worthless trinkets to misnamed chickens, here are the histories and etymologies of 13 Christmassy words.

George Orwell brought a vocabulary fit for a dystopia into the world. Corporate jargon sounds eerily similar.

Getting laid off has long been associated with getting a fancy pink invitation to the unemployment line. Why?

The six-sided tool helped make IKEA a household name. But did anyone named Allen have anything to do with it?

Here are 2024's trickiest terms to say, half of which are famous names.

Americans have no lack of idioms for snow and other features of winter weather. Here are 15 regional terms you should know.

You can binge Netflix in any room you like, but there are some key differences between these living areas.

To get to the answer, we need to discuss Latin, wooden stakes, Catherine the Great, and, of course, Shakespeare. 

Solving the etymological mysteries of 'innocent,' 'disgruntled,' and other prefix-dependent words.

It’s a compressing of an earlier phrase that also yielded variations like ‘nilling, willing’ and ‘william-nilliam.’

If you’re grandiloquent, then you like to use extravagant, high-flown words—precisely like the 50 verbs listed here, which either refer to everyday activities or else can be used in place of everyday words.

We give you an obscure word with four definitions—one correct, three made up. Can you identify the correct one?