A frequently-repeated etymology of the fruit that we call an “orange” goes like this: The fruit was not grown in England, and when the dock-hands unloaded the cargo ships they heard the fruit referred to by its Spanish name: naranja. From this it became known as “a norange”, but over time this became “an orange” [more...]
“Parts of speech” refers to categories that are used by grammarians to describe how words are used in sentences. English has traditionally been viewed as having eight parts of speech, as follows: Nouns are words that represent persons, places, things or ideas. In the sentence “Life is good,” “life” is a noun. Pronouns are words [more...]
Since the bird we know as the turkey originated in North America, it may seem strange that it has the same name as a country that straddles Europe and Asia. But there is a connection between the words. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary and other sources, the word “turkey” as applied to birds dates [more...]
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, I always referred to carbonated soft drinks as “pop,” or maybe “soda pop.” So I became confused sometime later when I moved briefly to California and was surprised to hear cans or bottles of pop referred to as “sodas” — to me, a soda is [more...]
A pangram is a sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet. If no letters are repeated, the sentence is a perfect pangram. Perfect pangrams can be rather unsatisfying, because they need to make use of obscure words, abbreviations, slang or proper nouns. Here are a few perfect pangrams: Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext [more...]
If you visit South Africa, you’ll find that English is now the main language for signage, education and tourism. But South African English, as well as being spoken with a distinctive accent, has adopted many words from the Afrikaans language, and from various African languages including Zulu and Xhosa. Here are some of the words [more...]
There are so many bad puns around, it’s hard to pick the worst. But here are some of the contenders: Two oranges go into a bar. One turns to the other and says, “Your round.” Then there’s the mystic who goes to the dentist to get a tooth pulled. But he refuses to take a [more...]
According to various authorities, including West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, the term “kangaroo court” came from the American frontier of the 19th century. In those days it was common for judges to go from town to town to hold trials, and they gained a reputation of being biased, as their pay sometimes depended on how [more...]
Many sticklers for grammar insist that it’s very bad form to wantonly split an infinitive. But what is a split infinitive, and what’s the problem? The infinitive is the plain form of a verb, preceded by the word “to”. For example: to be, to run, to have, to eat, to love. One way to look [more...]
Too often, the apostrophe is used badly. English teachers, newspaper editors and just about anyone with a eye for English grammar cringe almost daily when they when they see apostrophes used in plurals (as if I had ended that sentence “apostrophe’s used in plurals”). So the first rule of apostrophes is this: With very, very [more...]
The Christian Bible has not only been translated to more languages than any other book, and it also has been translated to English more times than any other. Since very few people could understand the Bible in its original languages — Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic — portions of it have been translated to English ever [more...]
The longest word in a recognized English language dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, but few people would ever have used that word or heard it spoken. So what is the longest word that is in everyday speech? I wasn’t sure how to define common usage, so I settled on a completely arbitrary criterion: the word needed to [more...]
To figure out what is the longest word, we need to ask ourselves first what a “real” word is. In scientific usage, you can give chemicals names hundreds or even thousands of letters long by stringing together all sorts of word parts. Also, at least in theory, just as you could have an anti-missile, you [more...]
What’s the correct spelling of practice/practise and licence/license in every situation? As you probably already know, it depends on where you live, and how the words are being used. In United States English, it’s always “practice” and “license”, whether the word acts as a noun or a verb. An American will practice driving to gain [more...]