These are very simple and common words but being unique, we cannot apply the comparative method to them and therefore cannot reconstruct their origins. These "proper words" represent an exciting ...

Word of the Day: Catapult-More than 1.5 million English-language articles and posts used the word “catapult” online in the past year, according to aggregated media monitoring data. The term trends ...

The 1970s ushered in a decade of revolution, from the pioneering of digital technology to the resurgence of a counterculture that sparked a wave of musical innovations. With these new developments and ...

As many educators and researchers will attest, there’s no exact science to choosing vocabulary words—no inherent reason the word “detest” is more important to teach than “despise,” or why “compassion” ...

Word of the Day: Quiddity —English dictionaries list more than 170,000 words in current use. Yet many educated readers struggle with one category in particular: abstract nouns rooted in medieval ...

Detail from Tacuinum Sanitatis, a 14th-century handbook of medieval health. The naming process, the act of naming the items of the world, is as old as the first words spoken by our ancestors. We can ...