When you had sleepovers as a child, what did you call the makeshift beds you made on the floor? In some places, you call those bedclothes and blankets a pallet. This word comes from an old term for “straw.” And: What’s the story...
Are there words and phrases that you misunderstood for an embarrassingly long time? Maybe you thought that money laundering literally meant washing drug-laced dollar bills, or that AM radio stations only broadcast in the morning? • A moving new...
Shaun Usher has collected many marvelous epistles in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (Bookshop|Amazon). One of them, from E. B. White, is a thoughtful letter of encouragement urging the reader to “wind the clock...
While compiling the Oxford English Dictionary, lexicographer James Murray exchanged hundreds of letters a week with authors, advisors, and volunteer researchers. A new collection online lets you eavesdrop on discussions about which words should be...
Yvette, a biology professor in Bismarck, North Dakota, wonders why some words are more pleasurable to say than others. Among her favorites: ovoviviparous, which describes animals whose eggs hatch inside the mother’s body or shortly after being...
Thanks to a project led by Professor Charlotte Brewer of Oxford University and research fellow Stephen Turton of Cambridge, you can now enjoy a trove of letters between James Augustus Henry Murray and his many correspondents during his work on what...