linguistlaura

[Please note that this is a scheduled post, and I am taking part in the ongoing industrial action by my union, UCU.] You should always learn...

There's a really great post at Merriam-Webster about why the word antidisestablishmentarianism  isn't in the dictionary. Basically,...

I've been looking at mattresses lately. It's bewildering. Not least is the instruction that some of them have: No-turn mattress. R...

[This relates to my recent post about 'cheeky Nando's'. If you want to take the survey, do so here . We'd be really gratefu...

Hooray! It's been too long since Richard Dawkins last tweeted something massively ill-judged for me to blog about. The context: Dawk ...

A recent Language Log post pointed out a humorously ambiguous headline: The joke is of course that it sounds like the kebab van drove o...

Words get into the language in lots of funny ways. Most of them have been there so long we don't know, or we just know that we brought t...

Some people have noticed that the search bar on facebook looks like this, and suggested an improvement: They think it should read ...

I saw the verb oversuds used recently. Clearly it's derived from the noun suds , which became a verb in its own right first. The OED ha...

When I was young I liked to learn facts about language. I was also a smug little git so what I liked best of all was to learn a fact that wo...

The Oxford English Dictionary celebrated its centenary a while ago, and to commemorate it they published this limited edition print run of t...