lexicography

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 Sadesan Hoax: A Language That Never Was

In the early days of the internet, a mysterious language called Sadesan appeared, promising a lost branch of the Indo-European…

1 week ago

The Great Tea Divide: Cha vs. Te

Ever wonder why it's 'chai' in Moscow but 'tea' in London? The answer lies not in a dictionary, but on…

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 Politics of Dictionaries

Ever wonder who decides when a word like 'rizz' is official? This post delves into the surprisingly political world of…

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

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

The Fight for Purity: Inside the Académie Française and the Quest to Protect the French Language

For nearly 400 years, the forty "immortals" of the Académie Française have stood as the official guardians of the French…

3 weeks ago

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