#eng342

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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.

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Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

"Tea" spread by sea, while "cha" spread by land.

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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.

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

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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?

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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.

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There's No Such Thing as a ’Language’

Dialects are all there is.