Of course, it's impossible to provide an exact number of words in English, since new words are being added to the dictionary, and falling out of use, pretty much constantly. But what's an approximate ...

The Scripps National Spelling Bee is here, representing one of the most vigorous — and prestigious — academic competitions in America. Unsurprisingly, a competition as renowned as the national ...

IMAGINE a world without numbers. Time and space would lose their meaning: telling time and counting the passing days, months and years would become impossible. Our ability to use numbers is essential ...

Download an MP3 audio interview with the author here, or sign up for Slate’s free daily podcast on iTunes. At the other end of the scale, estimates of the number of words that an average person uses ...

An anthropological linguist has shown that the language of the Piraha, an Amazonian tribe, lacks number words and as a result the people have a difficult time performing common quantitative tasks. The ...

Caleb Everett was a 2015 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. He receives funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Numbers do not exist in all cultures. There are numberless hunter-gatherers embedded ...