Words

From turtles to tigers, you can drop any one of these 15 creatures into your everyday conversation.

The words used in the Harry Potter books and movies are playable in a new version of Scrabble—and they can even earn you bonus points.

He’s dealt with elaborate booby traps, KGB agents, and a face-melting artifact, but to Indiana Jones, nothing’s more unsettling than snakes. Lots of people can relate.

Whether it's pea, newt, or nickname, these words started out as other words entirely. Can you guess their original versions?

If you’re a dog or cat owner, these words are worthy of a place in your vocabulary.

Pendle Hill is really Hill Hill Hill. Here are 11 others like that.

It was actually written about another set of postal workers from 500 BCE.

Women at Australia's Flemington Racecourse—which gives us the phrase "Flemington Confetti"

Gammon and spinach!

In 1986, the famed news anchor spent a week defending the puzzling new way he ended his broadcasts.

Typos and other errors have always managed to find their way into print, even in the most august of publications.

For decades, linguists have been able to use the quirks of written texts to pinpoint the author. The process, called stylometric analysis or stylometry, has dozens of legal and academic applications.

A bobolink, said to have been named for the call it makes

Onomatopoeia is responsible for a lot more words than you might think. Laugh might have been invented to sound like, well, a laugh. Owl, crow, and raven are all descended from Old English words (ule, crawe, hræfn) that were meant to imitate the owl’s hoot

Writers often turn to a thesaurus to diversify their vocabulary and add nuance to their prose. But looking up synonyms and antonyms in a thesaurus can help anyone—writer or not—find the most vivid, incisive words to communicate thoughts and ideas.