Linguistics in Real Life

A collection of online articles, sources, and tools for linguistics students

[jessiesams]

Designer Transforms Arabic Words into Illustrations of Their Literal Meanings

Designer Mahmoud Tammam posed a creative challenge to himself: an experimental typographic series of Arabic illustrated words.

[jessiesams]

Chartreuse, the Color of Elixirs, Flappers, and Alternate Realities

Let me tell you about a color that began as a fabled drink. It tasted harsh and punishing, like medicine. It began as a mythic elixir.

[jessiesams]

Among the recent additions to Macmillan’s Open Dictionary – crowdsourced through reader submissions – is the colourful word blatherskite. This can refer either

[jessiesams]

P is for pterodactyl, T is for tsunami: the 'worst alphabet book' becomes a bestseller

A picture book dedicated to English’s strangest quirks has made the New York Times bestseller list with the publisher scrambling to reprint. How did the rapper behind it dream it up?

[jessiesams]

The Dictionary and Us

David Skinner on why the American Heritage Dictionary closed its usage panel this year—and why it existed in the first place.

[jessiesams]

This Grammar Guru Will Solve the World’s Problems

Or, at least, help you figure out when to use an Oxford comma.

[jessiesams]

Welcome to Voldemorting, the Ultimate SEO Dis

When writers swap Trump for Cheeto and 45, it's not just a put-down. Removing a keyword is the anti-SEO—transforming your subject into a slippery, ungraspable, swarm.

[jessiesams]

[jessiesams]

A playwright, of course, writes plays. As wright and write are pronounced the same, it’s easy to confuse the two words – and tempting to think they are related. Perhaps we might even suppose wright is some Anglo-Saxon ancestor of write. Bedeviling as it may be, their similarity in sound and sense is a lexical coincidence. What, then, is that wright in playwright? To understand what ‘makes’ up the word, we’ll have to break it down.

[jessiesams]

There's No Such Thing as a ’Language’

Dialects are all there is.

[jessiesams]

Scrabble adds 300 words, including one we've all been waiting for: OK

Scrabble players might find themselves twerking their way to victory soon, as hundreds of new words have been added to the game.

[jessiesams]

[jessiesams]

A Linguist Explains Why 'Laurel' Sounds Like 'Yanny'

It’s the audio version of The Dress.

[jessiesams]

One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.

Obviously, there needs to be a standard. But do we really want to leave it to science?

[jessiesams]

[jessiesams]

[jessiesams]