LINGUISTICS

The English language loves a good loan word.

A study of online strategy game-players revealed an unsettling trend.

A new analysis of thousands of books finds that bestselling titles from the last few decades contain fewer strongly positive or negative words than older works such as ‘Pride and Prejudice’.

The word “huh” packs a lot of meaning into just one syllable.

What was once literature's favorite exclamation is now as dead as the Romantic poets who used it.

When we’re looking to describe an amount that’s teensy-weensy, the words aren’t precise, but they are folksy and charming.

For over a century, a controversy has been brewing over what might be called the Loch Ness Monster of dialect study: the elusive singular “y’all.” There are a few who claim to have seen it in the wild, and many who denounce such claims as nonsense. Does i

It turns out, there are a number of things about English that conspire to make “I could care less” a less irrational phrase than it might seem.

Before Sochi was selected as the host of the 2014 winter Olympics, not many people had heard of it, so it didn't have a widely known English pronunciation.

My dad always used to preface the dropping of an F-bomb or a tangent of creative profanity with a request that listeners “pardon his French.”

Around this time of year, we’re all loosening our belts and getting ready to gorge ourselves on hot, gravy-laden turkey. So we couldn’t help but wonder about things at the opposite end of the temperature spectrum: the “cold turkey” invoked when people up

Reader Jonathan wrote in to ask, “Why do we call other countries by names that they do not use themselves? Where did these names come from and why do we use them?"