English (language)

Cue games have had a lingering influence on our language and culture—even before the contributions of “Fast Eddie” Felson.

Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language declared Americans free from the tyranny of British institutions and their vocabularies.

Migration patterns, cultural ties, geographic regions and class differences all shape speaking patterns.

How English words evolved on a foreign continent.

This demonym will allow other Englishers to be recognized for their own locales.

Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology.

How English and Esperanto offer competing visions of a universal language.

People have passionate feelings about the oddball punctuation. Here are some things you probably didn't know about it.

By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, did colonial Americans still sound like their British counterparts?

Noah Webster, author of An American Dictionary of the English Language published in 1828, invented the word "immigration."

A web dictionary devoted to historical English slang—five hundred years of the vulgar tongue.

We are told that we are a Calvinist culture, which means very little, and none of that good.

A pre-history of the sentence diagrams that were once commonplace in the American classroom.

How a 1960s interspecies communication experiment went haywire.

Slips of paper with peculiar regional terms crossed the Atlantic to Oxford and into the pages of a 70-year lexicographical project.

An exploration of the potential effects of regional accents on poetry and slant-rhyme.

The modern misunderstanding of the term "people of color" and the racial categories associated.

We tend to think of "they," "Mx.," and "hir" as recent inventions. But English speakers have been looking for better ways to talk about gender for a long time.

A linguistic trajectory of Puerto Rico's identity as the world’s oldest colony.

A review of "You Talkin’ to Me? The Unruly History of New York English."

When did people start using the phrase to refer to a group of two or more?

What would an American dictionary meen for the men and wimmen of America?

Is the unique dialect a vestige of Elizabethan England? Left over from Scots-Irish immigrants? Or something else altogether?

Since the 1960s, the reference book has cataloged how people actually use language, not how they should. That might be changing.

The costs of achieving the centuries-old lexicographical dream of capturing the entire English language.

An interactive feature that displays the new words that were used in print each year, going back centuries.

Language variation is just as diverse within Appalachia as it is outside of the region.

It crops up in our speech dozens of times every day, although it apparently means little. So how did "OK" conquer the world?

The turbulent late sixties saw the technique’s popularity explode—and it’s been helping moviemakers engage with the unsettling tempos of modern life ever since.

The invention’s true origin story has long been the subject of debate.