LANGUAGE

We experience the world through our senses, so it makes sense that our language should reflect those senses. This group of words traces back to the basic elements of taste: sour, bitter, sweet, and salty.

Hanging on to your high school or college Spanish—or French, or German, etc—is a challenge once you're no longer enrolled in classes.

Bilingual jokes and puns that work in two languages, or contain multiple languages as a part of the joke, are the crown jewels of any (jo)kingdom.

Your cat may be absorbing more than you think.

Some birds communicate different meanings based on the order of the notes they sing.

Tiger, moon, and buttonhole are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to words you probably didn’t know could be used as verbs—so why not try dropping some of these into conversation?

English number words are pretty logical for the most part, but eleven and twelve really don’t fit in at all.

Of all the king’s intellectual interests, however, his love of language was perhaps the most significant—and he may have once sent two infants to live on an island with a deaf-mute woman just to see what would happen.

A new linguistic trend has been spotted on the culinary reality show.

The British have many delightful and colorful expressions that often make no sense to the rest of the world.

Many of the world’s currencies take their names from fairly predictable origins—like weights and measures or precious metals, for example—but the currency of Tonga, the pa‘anga, has a rather unusual history.

So easy, a robot can do it.