Words and Language

Traditionally favoured by Oxford University Press, the Oxford comma is considered to be one of the most controversial parts of grammar in

With today being St. David’s Day, what better time to explore a language with more than half a million speakers and over 1,500 years of history? Many Englanders’ knowledge of Welsh might be limited to what they have seen on road signs, but there are a handful of words they will be quite familiar with […]

We speak the same language on both sides of the Atlantic, yet there are a few small but important differences in how we spell certain words. When typing, be sure to have your spellcheck set on the correct dictionary depending on whether you’re writing for a British or American audience. If you don’t, you word […]

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has just released its January 2018 update, with 240 brand new words making it into the publication, along with around 900 subentries. A notable theme among the latest entries is parenting, pregnancy and women’s health, with 47 of them coming from suggestions via the website Mumsnet. OED has long sought […]

Following a 2006 report by the Department for Education and Skills, a system known as ‘synthetic phonics’ has been recommended as the “prime approach” to teaching children how to read, write and spell in the UK. Phonics, if you’re not familiar with the term, involves teaching what letters sound like; for example, the letter W […]

A glaring spelling error can botch anything, and it seems like some marketers, broadcasters and other decision-makers might have been at the Christmas sherry a little bit early this year, with some extremely poor spelling slip-ups having made the recent news. Here are three of the most cringe-worthy Christmas cock-ups we’ve seen this

Last week, we took a look at the effects of long words and complicated language, and how they can actually limit your writing rather than enhance it. In slight defiance of our own advice, this week we’re going to look at the longest words in our language (according to

Today is Friday the 13th, a day connected with horror, fear and misfortune, and nothing sends a shiver down a writer or grammarian’s spine like bad spelling. Tools like autocorrect have made the gift of learning how to spell less valuable, and spelling errors harder to make, but they remain common in online forums, chat […]

Where would we be without the ability to ask questions? Whether rhetorical (like that one) or specific requests for information or responses, we would be a very boring and ignorant species if we never questioned anything. When talking, we can use intonation to make it clear that what we’re saying is a question. In writing, […]

For whatever reason, the spelling bee has never quite taken off on these shores. While Americans seem to lap it up, precocious children spelling obscure words out loud is something that doesn’t seem to appeal to British audiences. Those who have never watched a spelling bee may not realise that competitors are not simply given […]

Words that are pronounced the same way but have different meanings are known as ‘homophones’. Often, as well as sounding the same, they are

Even the most proficient writers have the occasional word they just can’t remember how to put together. Perhaps you’re always tempted to put an ‘a’ somewhere in the word ‘sentence’, or maybe you find yourself reciting ‘I before E, except after C’ to yourself before wrongly spelling words like ‘weird’, ‘weight’ and ‘leisure’. The state […]

Despite being the largest country on the planet, as well as one of the most powerful, most of us know little about Russia and particularly its language. While we may remember some French, German or Spanish from school, Russian, with its 33-character Cyrillic alphabet, is a lot more alien to the majority of Brits. This […]

Of all the gripes that grammarians have, it’s often the smallest and seemingly most innocuous that annoy them the most. Apostrophes and their correct use is one matter that keeps many sticklers for grammar awake at night. This is literally the case for the so-called ‘Grammar Vigilante’, a mystery night-time activist who seems to have

A topic of conversation that always remains hotly contested among writers is how to refer to an unspecified person. We do this quite naturally in spoken English, but when writing, the choices of personal pronouns at our disposal mean that we sometimes spend longer than we should pondering which ones will help us achieve the […]