15 Words You Use Without Realizing They're From Foreign Languages
The English language loves a good loan word.
The English language loves a good loan word.
Thanks to some hard-working scholars, Harry Potter, Winnie the Pooh, and Bilbo Baggins are now getting kids hooked on the language of Virgil.
A surprising number of common English food and beverage words have Arabic backgrounds.
A big night for the gender-neutral singular pronoun.
Love them or hate them, we all know what these figures are supposed to mean.
Author Roald Dahl was famous for the nonsensically whimsical language he created in his books, but the origin of those words has its roots in tragedy.
Merriam-Webster chooses their winner by tracking which words people look up the most over the course of the year in their online dictionary. This year, the most noticeable increases in lookups happened across a whole cluster of words that shared something
Shaylee has impressed us with her amazing ASL storytelling skills for two years in a row.
Sometimes we must turn to other languages to find the perfect word (or 'le mot juste') for a particular situation. Here are a bunch of foreign words with no direct English equivalent.
Sometimes we must turn to other languages to find the perfect word (or 'le mot juste') for a particular situation. Here are a bunch of foreign words with no direct English equivalent.
After hundreds of episodes—and with no end in sight—'The Simpsons' has changed the way we talk to one another.
The Words U keyboard will suggest new words based on "personas" like "The English Aristocrat."
Over the years, this mental literary fail has gone by many names: work decrement, extinction, reminiscence, verbal transformation. But the best known and recognized term is "semantic satiation."
The difference between sincere and insincere may be just one little punctuation mark.
How is language evolving on the internet? In this series on internet linguistics, Gretchen McCulloch breaks down the latest innovations in online communication.
All words had to start somewhere—but sometimes, after much searching and analyzing, no satisfying origin explanation can be found.
The inventor of Magnetic Poetry was thrust into his life's work by one well-timed sneeze.
Without a new generation of Speakers, the Native American language could die out in a few generations.
Few franchises have had the cultural impact of the various 'Star Trek' television series and movies, and nowhere is that more evident than in the snippets of dialogue that have become a part of the American vernacular.
Unlike other "languages," sign language—be it American or otherwise—is a visual language, and therefore, can take a long time to master.
So on top of influences of Aboriginal, English, Irish, and German, the accent may have a few pints to thank.
Nutella engaged a panel of dialect scholars to put together a guide to 135 characteristic expressions from 16 regions of Italy.
Some common words that usually don’t have a whiff of tommyrot are also in the BS lexicon.