Words

'Smith' is an Old English name that was given to those who worked with metal. It's probably related to a word that meant "to strike." Where does your last name come from?

Words are often formed by mishearings, inversion of sounds, dropping and adding of sounds, and other all-too-human errors.

Whether it's Joe Schmo, Fred Nurk, or Vasya Pupkin, every country needs a way to talk about just “some guy.”

From our friends at Vocabulary.com, here are words describing people's behavior that are easy to confuse with other words, or easy to be confused about, period.

From bears and storks to singing wolves and castrated sheep, all 16 of the words listed here have surprising zoological origins.

They might seem straightforward on the surface, but hidden behind them is some remarkable quirk or bizarre piece of trivia that sets them apart.

Sauce has come a long way from its original noun meaning, passing through idiom, to adjective, to adjective-forming suffix. Still, it has kept in touch with its roots.

Some apples names are really just a desperate cry of “look how yummy I am!” Here are 18 varieties that, frankly, don’t care what you think.

When something is named after a person or a place or a company, we call that name an eponym. Eponyms are everywhere—in science, medicine, the arts. This list from our friends at Vocabulary.com focuses on words that are historically eponyms but are so comm

Last week, we published an item on how crossword puzzles are made. As many, many readers pointed out, we didn't have our facts straight. You deserve better!

Use all your tiles at once and get that 50-point bonus with these common words.

Sometimes, through some quirk of etymology—and sometimes entirely by coincidence—first names like these find their way into the dictionary as words in their own right, and end up ultimately taking on whole new meanings in the language.

The two prefixes are not equivalent.

The government guidelines for place names on product labels can be quite complex.

Make use of these fancy insults with classical Greek and Latin roots to really class up the joint while you twist the dagger.

"Accidentally misfired" and "young baby" are redundant terms that should not be used.

In 2014, a leaked copy of the Directorate of Intelligence Style Manual & Writer's Guide for Intelligence Publication, a.k.a. Strunk & White for spies, found its way to the Internet.