LANGUAGE

From worthless trinkets to misnamed chickens, here are the histories and etymologies of 13 Christmassy words.

George Orwell brought a vocabulary fit for a dystopia into the world. Corporate jargon sounds eerily similar.

According to viral videos on TikTok and Instagram, pet dogs are expressing their demands using button boards instead of barking. But is the communication legit?

We give you an obscure word with four definitions—one correct, three made up. Can you identify the correct one?

The six-sided tool helped make IKEA a household name. But did anyone named Allen have anything to do with it?

Here are 2024's trickiest terms to say, half of which are famous names.

Americans have no lack of idioms for snow and other features of winter weather. Here are 15 regional terms you should know.

We give you an obscure word with four definitions—one correct, three made up. Can you identify the correct one?

Solving the etymological mysteries of 'innocent,' 'disgruntled,' and other prefix-dependent words.

The origins of the term come from the Irish word for “ring.”

This ancient symbol, also called the Staff of Hermes, depicts two snakes intertwining around a stick that is capped by wings. It’s used as a medical logo, but for almost all its roughly 5000-year history, the caduceus had nothing to do with medicine. 

A new study finds that residents of Dublin, Belfast, and Glasgow were better at detecting fake accents than their counterparts in southern areas of England—possibly as a result of long-ago conflicts.