Expanding your vocabulary is great for your brain.

Many languages recycle words, giving them different meanings. For example, in English, "run" can mean to move quickly but ...

Think about a word that looks like its meaning. For instance, the word bed kind of looks like a bed, with the vertical lines resembling the posts at either end. Loop looks very loopy. Some words are ...

Children learn language effortlessly and completely voluntarily. They learn new words miraculously fast. A teenager masters about 60,000 words of their mother tongue by the time they finish high ...

Everyday words, such as ‘red’, ‘sad’, ‘house’, ‘run’ and ‘sister’, may strike us as denoting concepts that exist independently of any language. In a traditional view, words such as these map onto ...

It’s a very satisfying thing to learn that there’s a word for an experience you didn’t know could be described by a word. Learning that, for example, clinomania is an “excessive desire to stay in bed” ...

Even if you’re not a full-blown grammar nerd, you’ll find the origins of these words that changed meaning over time completely fascinating The English language is alive—and like any living thing, it ...

Some words have travelled a remarkable distance from their original setting, taking on broader meanings as language has ...

Everyday objects and people have an emotional meaning. A wool sock might have an emotional value if it was the last thing grandmother knitted before her death. The same applies to words. A stranger's ...