WORDS

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.

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.

You'll be looking for a way to work these adorable old-timey slang terms for sex into conversation—trust us.

We need to borrow these.

Thirteen of these etymological tall-tales, taken from word origins guide 'Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons,' are explained and debunked here.

Terrible and terrific are both formed off the same root: terror. Both started out a few hundred years ago with the meaning of terror-inducing. But terrific took a strange turn at the beginning of the 20th century and ended up meaning really great, not ter

A few years ago, Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson pointed out that the best way to expose a German spy would be to ask them to say the word “squirrel,” because “no German, no matter how well they speak English, can say ‘squirrel.’” So naturally, someone test

We've lost many delightful words and phrases along the way.