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 ...

Bargatze portrayed George Washington for a second time to explain some of the unusual rules of the English language in the ...

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

Noah Webster was the patriot armed with a pen. He defined 12,000 new words in the wake of the American Revolution, using ...

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

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 ...

“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 ...