Words

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day! Let’s hoist the Jolly Roger, break out the rum, and look back at the holiday’s timber-shivering history.

Photo illustration by Mental Floss. Image: iStock.

Television can be a hotbed of creativity (or mediocrity, depending on who you ask). But it's not just characters and storylines writers are coming up with—they also coin words.

A world without Roald Dahl would be a world without Oompa Loompas, Snozzcumbers, or Muggle-Wumps. And who would ever want to live in a world like that?

Author Roald Dahl with his then-wife, actress Patricia Neal.

The dictionary goes from aardvark to zozimus because "every dictionary has to start with aardvark; otherwise it would have to start with aback, which is just too boring."

Warning: dad jokes ahead.

"Fave" is new to the dictionary, but it dates back to 1938.

Hunting for new ways to express yourself that don't involve emojis? Look no further than these charming words and phrases hailing from the land of fire and ice.

Would you recoil in terror if spell-check ever stopped working? Fear not: You're in good company.

A group of mathematicians at the University of Vermont published a paper on positivity in the English language.

They may have been on people’s tongues even earlier, but 1914 marks the earliest year the lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary could document these words and phrases in print.

Tongue twisters have had people tripping over words for centuries.

Whether it's selling seashells by the seashore or buying Betty Botter's bitter butter, some of these difficult phrases go way back to when elocution was practiced as routinely as multiplication tables.