Words

English spelling is a crazy mess, but it’s a mess that makes sense if you look at how it got that way.

A semordnilap (itself a semordnilap of “palindromes”) makes a completely different word when spelled backwards.

Criminals have been referring to police as pigs since at least 1811—but they've also called cops and private detectives by many other, more creative names.

Add these abstract nouns to your vocabulary.

These –ty coinages have a slangy, modern ring to them, but English speakers have actually been trying to make –ty happen for centuries.

Now the names for these creatures big and small make total sense.

The Oxford English Dictionary is honoring the centenary with an appeal to the public for help in finding the earliest documented uses of words that first came into English during World War I.

It's very cold, and we're running out of ways to say that. So we reached out to the editors of the Dictionary of American Regional English for suggestions.

We all come into contact with many of these shapes every day. Here's what you can call them.

From reality TV shows to The Beach Boys’ croons of Aruba and Jamaica, references to honeymoons are everywhere. But where did the term "honeymoon" first come from?

You won't find crikey in this book, but there are plenty other weird and wonderful terms work incorporating into everyday conversation.

The OED upped its entry count with three updates last year—here's a snapshot retrospective of the words committed to dictionary immortality in 2013.

The American Dialect Society waits until the year is completely finished before holding its vote for the word of the year, a lively event, now in its 24th year, that was held last night. Here are some of the words that were up for discussion.

Parhelia of "sun dogs" appear over a field in Iowa.

When winter bears down, it can be hard to think of anything outside of how much you hate (or love!) the snow and ice. Here are a few of the words and phenomena that could define this season.

Hindsight tells us that Word of the Year candidates have not always fared so well.

Every year, Oxford Dictionaries names a Word of the Year, the word “that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance.”

Love is patient. Love is kind. And often, love is denoted by the Greek root -phile.

Some words can be pronounced with two different syllable structures. What’s more interesting than fighting about who’s right is understanding why these differences arise.

On the 11th of every month, we publish a bunch of lists of 11. Virginia C. McGuire gets us started.

A recent study analyzed 15.4 million Facebook messages to find which words are used most often by people at different stages of life.

It has been two years since “don’t ask, don’t tell” was repealed as a military policy, but it seems to have taken up residence in our storehouse of ready-made expressions for good, which is not surprising, considering how succinctly it captures a particul

While usual rhymes like moon/June are scattered through the lists, the true genius of the book is in pairings like better half/telegraph.

There's a system to Ikea product naming that matches word categories to product categories. Then there are names that don't relate to the products in any way.

Travel back to a time when 'lady’s low toupee' and 'Master John Goodfellow' were perfectly acceptable terms for genitalia.

Why Are “Rhyme” and “Rhythm” Spelled Like That?

9 Words Created by Spelling Other Words Backwards

11 Old Timey Criminal Slang Terms for the Police

14 Old Abstract Nouns We Need to Bring Back

12 Animals Whose Names Etymologically Describe Them

11 Words and Phrases Popularized by World War I

11 Obscure Regional Phrases to Describe the Cold

12 Shapes You Didn’t Know Had Names

Where Does the Term "Honeymoon" Come From?

11 Delightful 19th-Century Australian Slang Terms

12 New Words Added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013

The American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year is “Because”

11 Wonderful Winter Weather Terms

11 'Word of the Year' Candidates Everyone Forgot Immediately

The Word of the Year Is...

15 -Philes and What They Love

3 Reasons for Syllabically Ambiguous Words

11 Vocabulary Words for Typography Nerds

What Your Facebook Updates Say About Your Age

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: The Birth of an Idiom

22 Songs that Write Themselves from The Songwriter’s Rhyming Dictionary

14 Swedish Words That Conflict With the Ikea Products They Name

35 Classy Slang Terms for Naughty Bits From the Past 600 Years