Writers and language geeks inherit a ranking system of sorts: verbs good, adjectives bad, nouns sadly unavoidable. Verbs are action, verve! “I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken ...

A reader wrote a letter to me (oh happy day!), and although I'm still not entirely sure what she's trying to accomplish, it's an interesting puzzle to try to tackle anyway. Here's what she asked: I do ...

IN everything we do involving other people, we make use of communication in some form. Of the different forms of communication, language – either spoken or written – is the most common. We use words ...

What does '6-7' mean? Here's why kids are saying 'six, seven' over and over.

Sometimes a noun looks like it should be plural when it isn’t. Chances are that this noun is called a mass noun. Mass nouns are nouns that, by their very nature, are plural. These are also called ...

With the advent of social media, words, rather nouns like 'inbox' and 'bookmark' are now being used as verbs. Read on for more such gems... The English language is constantly evolving, reason why many ...

Most collective nouns, or "terms of venery," were coined during the 15th century. Many were codified in books of courtesy, like the 1486 classic Book of St. Albans. St. Albans was a handbook for ...

The word "time" is the most common noun in the English language, according to the latest Oxford dictionary. Oxford University Press researchers looked on the internet at newspapers, journals, fictions ...

A cavity of Collingwood fans, a scrape of cyclists, an inferno of tobacco shops — this is Melbourne’s hypothetical list of 100 collective nouns. But what if we could have a yakka of tradies, an ...

For more than a decade, neuroscientists have known that stress impairs memory performance—an effect likely due to the influence of stress-related hormones. A recent article in Science shows that a ...