WORDS

The "Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary" is the first work of its kind to be published in nearly 50 years.

He'd had enuf of the old way. Known for his uncompromising stance on many issues, in the early 1900s Roosevelt used the full power of his position to try to force through several hundred new spelling reforms.

It's human nature to conceive of abstract ideas through more immediate, concrete experiences—which is to say, through metaphors. Most of the words we have for abstract concepts began this way.

Call us mint jelly ...

Pull apart the word "trivia," and you’ll be left with two fairly familiar Latin roots.

Let me put this right up front. The headline to this post is slightly misleading, but not dishonest.

By some accounts, the average person owns 19 pairs of shoes. But it’s not just our closets that are overflowing with sneakers, loafers, pumps, and wedges. It’s also our vocabulary.

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang pinpoints comedian Jimmy Durante as the first person to use this meaty metaphor.

Here are 20 American towns that have really cut the cord from the sources of their names.

Sometime around the 7th century, a grammarian got fed up and started collecting all the annoying mistakes that people kept making in Latin. He wrote them up in the 'Appendix Probi,' a straightforward list of the “say this, not that” variety.

You keep using that word…