Do you want a dessert or desert? Spelling matters here; a letter decides whether you are asking for some sweet courses or a ...

English can be a very silly language, with many words looking nothing like the way they should be said. There are also a lot of words that so many people say slightly wrong, that often people are ...

Suppose you never had a teacher who taught you “grammar,” by which I mean how to diagram sentences, distinguish singular ...

More embarrassingly, what Monet practised with was his brush and “palette” – a palette being the flat board on which an ...

Shashi Tharoor’s latest book misses a trick in not mining Gen Z and Alpha vocabulary as deeply as it deserves to be ...

Unlike in British English, Americans frequently use the word ‘skunk’ as a verb as well. When you say that the rival team ...

There are 26 letters in the alphabet but when you start to string them together, there are more than 170,000 options in ...

Ahead of the election, the Orange County Register compiled a list of questions from our readers to pose to the candidates who ...

Due to the large number of readers who appreciated the recent column on loanwords from around the world, I am dedicating ...

The word “academic” derives from Plato’s Academy, which he founded on ground that was named after the legendary Greek hero Academos, or Hekademos. And academic was someone who taught or studied at the ...

The excitement of words was palpable at the fifth season of the national Collins Spelling Bee Championship, held on 28 ...

“Aichi” or “Aiti,” which is the preferred spelling? That is one of the ... style of romanization when writing Japanese words in English. But the notice also allowed for exceptions with ...