Three little letters, 645 meanings. Imagine you’re a dictionary editor. For eight hours a day, five days a week, every week until the heat death of the universe or the day human beings stop speaking ...

Origin Uncertain: Unravelling the Mysteries of Etymology. By Anatoly Liberman. Oxford University Press; 344 pages; $29.99 and £22.99 MANY WORDS are puzzles themselves. “Conundrum” confounds scholars; ...

The English language is full of words that seem overstuffed with unnecessary letters, feel like they should be spelled a different way, or just don't make sense. Here are some of our favorites, ...

Are you a lifelong logophile, a voracious vocabularian, or a savvy sesquipedalian? If so, you've come to the right place. Between books, texts, emails, articles, and Wikipedia rabbit holes, we all ...

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It’s strange that the literature of a language that rubs up against so many others should be as wary of translation as English is. For English speakers, there seems to be an expectation that the ...

A new book exploring the origins of common food terms — from bialy to lima bean to bibimbap — is a fascinating history of how we eat and cook. By Kim Severson Used judiciously, the snappy tidbits of ...

The English language is full of fascinating patterns, exceptions, and creative spellings that make it one of the most studied languages in the world. Among these linguistic wonders are words that ...