Category: Word Stories

In most European languages, the spring festival commemorating the resurrection of Christ is referred to by a name related to…

Thanks to the many people who expressed an interest in last month’s column on the verb be. A colleague asked…

Often, the longer and more unusual a word, the easier it is to trace its development. It can be broken…

How does a word once full of negative connotations come to mean something positive? Take nice, for example. Nice is…

Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language. ‘[T]he who/whom distinction is going the way of the phonograph…

Eponyms, names for things derived from people’s names, are peppered throughout the English language, like a kind of social history…

Etymology works in two directions. You can take a word in modern English and work backwards to its roots, as…

Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language. Behind every word there is history. And in the case…