The meaning behind British small talk It would be easy for any outsider to believe that the British are obsessed with the weather....

The Oxford English Dictionary For more than a century, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has been considered the most authoritative of...

Covid-19 language and the Oxford English Dictionary Table of contents Covid-19 language and the Oxford English Dictionary A dictionary...

Forensic linguistics and Forensic Phonetics in criminal investigation Table of contents Forensic linguistics and Forensic Phonetics in...

Shakespeare, parlour games and kids – the history of knock-knock jokes Guaranteed to inspire many giggles, knock-knock jokes are firm...

Fozzbonkling nonsense words that excite your simploncs All languages evolve across the ages, with new words being added every year and...

Are there any English speaking EU countries? Until the 1990s, French was the dominant language of the EU. But new countries continued to...

Sandwiches and silhouettes – famous eponyms are everywhere An eponym is a word that is derived from the proper name of a real or...

Prophetic names – the wonderful world of aptronyms Personal names can be so damn funny, can’t they? It’s impossible not to laugh when you...

The problem with English plurals English grammar is complex, contradictory and downright confusing! There are many aspects of the...

Motivating monikers: why job titles matter You will spend a huge proportion of your life at work. The nature of that work is inevitably...

Commonly misunderstood and misused English words English boasts a huge vocabulary in comparison with many languages. When there are...

Is it wrong to pull out all the glottal stops? People will always be judged by the way they speak. In Britain, the language police are...

Registering the difference – language and context Consciously or not, we all adapt the way we speak and write to suit our audience or the...

With Sellotape and knives – mondegreens in all their glory We’ve all experienced those awkward moments when we have completely misheard...

English is a very difficult language to master. So difficult that most native speakers struggle to remain grammatically correct or to...

Do English people speak too quickly? Any language can sound as if it is being spoken with indecent haste when you don’t understand it....

Tomorrow will be a good day – touch wood! The English language is loaded with strange phrases and sayings but there is none stranger than...

English accents: Geordie The term Geordie is used to describe both the natives of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne and their distinctive...

Malapropisms: How people sometimes choose the wrong birds A malapropism is the incorrect and often humorous use of a word instead of...