dictionary

Why Is English Spelling So Weird?

Ever wonder why 'knight' has a 'k' or 'island' has an 's'? The answer isn't that English is illogical, but…

1 week ago

The Interrobang’s Brief, Glorious Life

What do you get when you combine a question mark and an exclamation point? In the 1960s, frustrated ad man…

1 week ago

The Boontling Lingo of Boonville

Deep in a remote California valley, a community invented its own secret lingo called Boontling to gossip and joke in…

1 week ago

The Red Squiggle: Linguistics of Spell Check

That familiar red squiggle under a misspelled word isn't magic; it's a marvel of computational linguistics. This post explores the…

3 weeks ago

The Linguistics of ‘Google It’: When Brands Become Verbs

Ever wonder how "Google" went from a company name to a common verb in our dictionary? This article explores the…

3 weeks ago

The Gestural Lexicon: When Hand Signs Become Words

We do it without thinking: a thumbs-up for a job well done, a wave to say hello. But these hand…

3 weeks ago

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Have you ever felt a longing for a place you've never been, or the bittersweetness of a fleeting moment you…

3 weeks ago

The Press That Froze Language

The invention of the printing press was a revolution not just for knowledge, but for language itself. Before Gutenberg, language…

3 weeks ago

How Dictionaries Decide Who Lives and Who Dies

Ever wonder how words like "rizz" become official while others fade away into obscurity? This post goes behind the scenes…

3 weeks ago

The Billion-Word Crystal Ball: How Corpus Linguistics Predicts the Future of Language

Ever wonder how new words like 'rizz' make it into the dictionary or why grammar rules seem to change over…

3 weeks ago

This website uses cookies.