Thanks to the evolution of language, technology, and lots of hyperbole, these words used to convey a lot more merit, emotion, or simply seriousness than they do nowadays. Ah, “genius.” Once reserved ...

It’s a very satisfying thing to learn that there’s a word for an experience you didn’t know could be described by a word. Learning that, for example, clinomania is an “excessive desire to stay in bed” ...

Words have no intrinsic meaning. That is to say that the words don’t have meaning in and of themselves. Words are symbols of thoughts. We attach thoughts to words. The degree to which those ...

Modern progressive political narratives depend heavily upon the misuse of words, changing their meaning in hopes that people ...

We know that words change all the time and over time, a process language experts describe as “semantic shift,” semantics being the field of language concerned with meaning. Even if we may not ...

Some time ago, I fell into conversation with a colleague about what we had been reading lately, and the person suggested that I absolutely must give Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” a try. The pandemic ...

Sample sentences have long been a standard feature of many online and offline dictionaries. Starting today, Google Translate will also feature sentences that put translated words into context. Unlike ...

Children learn language effortlessly and completely voluntarily. They learn new words miraculously fast. A teenager masters about 60,000 words of their mother tongue by the time they finish high ...

One Word Substitution means using a single word to replace a long phrase or sentence without changing its original meaning. It helps make communication more clear, concise, and effective. These ...

It is striking that English color words come from many sources. Some of the more exotic ones, like “vermilion” and “chartreuse,” were borrowed from French, and are named after the color of a ...