Category: Word Stories

It’s been said that there are two words in English for which there are no perfect rhymes. One of them…

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…