WORDS

What Your Facebook Updates Say About Your Age

A recent study analyzed 15.4 million Facebook messages to find which words are used most often by people at different stages of life.

17 Words that Describe Themselves

Word is a word. Noun is a noun. Autological words are a self-centered, self-referential bunch.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: The Birth of an Idiom

It has been two years since “don’t ask, don’t tell” was repealed as a military policy, but it seems to have taken up residence in our storehouse of ready-made expressions for good, which is not surprising, considering how succinctly it captures a particul

22 Songs that Write Themselves from The Songwriter’s Rhyming Dictionary

While usual rhymes like moon/June are scattered through the lists, the true genius of the book is in pairings like better half/telegraph.

14 Swedish Words That Conflict With the Ikea Products They Name

There's a system to Ikea product naming that matches word categories to product categories. Then there are names that don't relate to the products in any way.

The True Origin Stories of 7 Happy Words

Not all of them started out so happy.

35 Classy Slang Terms for Naughty Bits From the Past 600 Years

Travel back to a time when 'lady’s low toupee' and 'Master John Goodfellow' were perfectly acceptable terms for genitalia.

12 Animal Adjectives to Bolster Your Vocabulary

You know some other animal adjectives ending in -ine: feline (catlike), canine (doggy) and bovine (cow like). How many more are there? A herd, a flock, a whole bunch. Here’s a dozen.

3 Facts About English’s Most Adorable Suffix

Is there any suffix more adorable than the lovely little –ling? It gives us yearlings and starlings, downy ducklings and goslings, affectionate darlings and siblings, and comforting tender dumplings. But –ling hasn’t always been so little and cute. It use

12 Onomatopoeias from Around the World

Other languages have their own ways of representing sounds in the world, too.

77 Common Mispronunciations

You're going to be astonished how many of these you hopefully already know, but I'm sharing them because many millions of people don't. It's not Aw-ree, for instance, it's ah-wry (awry)

6 Alternative Dictionaries Every Bookshelf Needs

Just because some dictionaries have fallen by the wayside in the years since the world's first dictionary doesn't mean that they weren't any good.

What Are Smithereens?

“Blown to smithereens” is such a great, colorful phrase. Almost everyone knows exactly what you mean, without being able to define what exactly a smithereen is. What the heck are they?

14 Street Art Terms—Illustrated!

Street art has gone mainstream. Just about every city in the world—as well as suburbs and deserts—has stickers, murals, and wheatpastes to admire. But what if it’s all graffiti to you?

How Is "I before E except after C" a Rule?

English spelling is hard. It's hard for kids to learn it, and it's hard for adults who have already learned it to remember how to do it right. It would be nice to have some consistent, general rules to go by, but alas, there are few. Maybe none. Even the

5 Phonetic Pitfalls of Shm- Reduplication

By adding shm- to words, you can be simultaneously grumpy and cute. But there are some words that cause confusion about how the shm- should best be attached.

Argle Bargle: 5 Meanings of Word Reduplication

In his angry dissent to the court's decision on the Defense of Marriage Act on Wednesday, Justice Scalia conveyed a specific kind of derision through his use of several colloquial expressions. The most noticeable of these expressions was "argle bargle," w

13 Screwball Film Industry Slang Terms

Having served as a camera operator on over 100 films, Dave Knox knows a thing or two about the wacky slang used by movie industry insiders. Here are a few.

11 Poets Who Wrote Dirty Verse

Think poets are just stodgy writers who sit at their desks penning boring poems? Think again. Here are eleven poets who sometimes showed their more bawdy side.

8 Persnickety Rules From the Associated Press Stylebook

Careful where you put that hyphen—here are eight rules from the AP Stylebook that you might never know unless you looked them up.

6 Dictionary Mysteries You Can Help Solve

Maybe you can help! Here are six appeals from the OED.

11 Mots Merveilleux Recently Added to the French Dictionary

The list of new additions reliably provokes indignant complaints about the decline of standards and ruination of the language, but detractors need not worry. The list actually shows how French remains robust, alive, and in step with the times.

Why Are There Two Pronunciations for 'G'?

16 Simple Concepts Made Simpler on Simple Wikipedia

Simple English Wikipedia was launched in 2003 as a resource for "people with different needs, such as students, children, adults with learning difficulties and people who are trying to learn English." In some if its reformulations, especially of already s

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