Question: The average American family has less than more than two children or less than more than two kids? Reply: less than How to remember it: Less than refers to things that can be counted (less than children, less than Many chairs). Less than often used to indicate the quantity of things that cannot be …
TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Ask the Editor, I’m Peter Sokolowski, Editor-in-Chief at Merriam-Webster. Everyone has a pet peeve on English. One thing we sometimes hear about is the use of the word hope to mean, I hope, as in “Hopefully it won’t rain tomorrow.” The use of the word hope seems to have started in the …
TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Ask the Editor. I’m Emily Brewster, associate editor at Merriam-Webster. A mischievous nuclear scientist comes to the library. Does that bother you? Sorry, or maybe it sounds good to you. Alright. My silly sentence consists of three questionable pronunciations… mis-ˈchē-vē-əs instead of mis-chə-vəs,nyü-kyə-lər instead ofˈnü-klē-ər, and lī-ˌber-ē for ˈlī-ˌbrer-ē, … all in …
TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Ask the Editor. I’m Emily Brewster, associate editor at Merriam Webster. A thrill spread throughout the literally packed court.James Joyce writes in Ulysses. No, the thrill described in that quote is not a feeling of being equipped with a special electrical charge. Joyce is using this word literally to mean effect or …
TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Ask the Editor. I’m Emily Brewster, associate editor at Merriam-Webster. – I’ve never been to a more fun party. – It was the funniest party I can remember. As a one-syllable adjective, cheerful must have superlative and superlative forms (funer and funnest), just as new has newer and newest. However, spell checkers …
Today, everyone seems to get tired: voters, onlookers – maybe even you after another driver cuts you off on your way to work. Enthusiasts have seen and done and heard enough to not be easily surprised or even amused. A politician’s promise? Yes, we’ve heard that before. A new movie not to be missed? We …
Today, well understand means “to cause a strong feeling of sadness” and pungent means “to have a strong, sharp taste or smell,” but they share a common history — they share the same Latin root, pungentmeans “to sting” or “to sting”. Both English words have changed over time; well understand originally meant “sharp and delicious” …
Older past tense of dive To be dive, is still standard in British English. use dove as the past tense of dive started in the 1800s, and is now standard in American English. Both forms are correct today, but you should be aware of regional preferences. By the time most native English speakers are adults, …
It is accused of all sorts of terrible things, first and foremost a lexical impostor. Big effect NOT a word! However, this is clearly wrong: big effect has been used since the 1950s and is used in all kinds of contexts and is understood by all kinds of people to mean “to have a powerful …
distinguish sometimes confused with tram. distinguish is a verb that means “to move incessantly from subject, song, etc. to another subject.” tramotherwise, is the trademarked name for an electrically powered transport device. Most of the most commonly confused words in English are old pairs: affect And functionor sporadic And discreet. But a new pair has …
study can mean “read something comfortably, or skim through” and can also mean “read something carefully or in detail.” study is therefore a contraonym because it has many seemingly contradictory definitions. A Merriam-Webster user recently messaged us on Twitter asking us for an entry for study: : to look at or read (something) intimately or …
‘Reticent’ can be used to refer to both “a tendency to be silent or non-communicative in speech” or “reluctance.” While some consider the meaning of “reluctantly” to be inelegant, it has been in widespread use for decades. The oldest meaning of discreet (and one that is still in use) is “a tendency to be silent …
Adjectives are useful words that describe nouns and pronouns. Words like High And slow And sweet. An attribute noun is a noun that modifies another noun—like ‘single’ in the phrase ‘single bar’. However, sometimes we find the words we’ve been taught are nouns that do the same job: One business meeting study papers ONE apartment …
Contradictions in thought And vague there’s Latin to thank for around share they share. In Latin around- means “both”, but for this pair of words, the idea is plural, not exactly two. If you are conflicted about something, you will have two feelings about it. On the other hand, ‘ambiguous’ means “not clear or likely …
Names are proper nouns, become plural like other nouns: add letters -S for most names (“the Johnsons,” “the Websters”) or more -es if the name ends with S or z (“the Joneses,” “the Martinezes”). To express ownership using an apostrophe, add ‘S to individuals (“Smith’s Car”) and simply the following apostrophe S for the plural …
TRANSCRIPT Welcome to Ask the Editor. I’m Emily Brewster, associate editor at Merriam-Webster. Please forgive that stepping into this important grammar issue bores you as you consider the following examples. – No more donuts. – No more coffee. – I was hoping there would be some left, but when I looked there was nothing left. …
Freeze means “don’t move,” while stationery refers to “paper for writing letters.” To remember which is which, stationery And paper both contain -er. They sound exactly the same and look almost identical, but in reality they are completely different. One way to remember which word it is is to think of the ‘er’ in ‘paper’ …
There are several opportunities to misuse the word disable, and English speakers and writers have been taking advantage of these opportunities for quite some time. Johnson O’Connor, written in monthly Atlantic Ocean in 1934, alleging that 52% of the college graduates he surveyed chose add the power as synonym for disableinstead of right weaken. Portrait …
respectfully relating to showing or showing respect, with respect means “understanding that something is important.” Corresponding means “in certain order” and in this case respect is being used to describe how one thing relates to or refers to another. Meaning of Respect Both corresponding And best regards Have respect their core. But they point to …
End a sentence with a preposition (such as ) with, belong toAnd ARRIVE) is allowed in English. It seems that the idea that this should be avoided originated with writers Joshua Poole and John Dryden, who were trying to align the language with Latin, but there is no reason to assume that ending sentences with …
Like most words people don’t hear from the mouths of Hollywood broadcasters and celebrities, repurchase accused is not a word. But it is a word. Actually, it’s two. The adjective ‘bought’ means ‘the opposite of homemade’ or ‘bought’. It can also suggest that something that should have been given away for free was paid to …
Verb form of theft could be either thief or thief. thiefformed by adding -ize suffix to thiefmore common in American English. thiefformed by removing -ar word suffix thief, more common in British English. Both words have been denigrated in the past, but both are considered perfectly fine. Theft: illegally entering a building with the intent …
Native English speakers never have to worry about one of our grammar quirks: uncountable noun (also called plural noun). These are words like sand or butter does not have a regular plural form, does not use indefinite articles such as One or ONE, and take the singular verb (“melting butter”; “sand blowing in his face”). …
Plural of nouns bus To be bus. You can see the plural bus, but that form is so rare that it seems like a bug to many people. You can also see the verbs busy And businessboth are rare and also a mistake for many people. The plural of bus To be bus. A plural …
sayings i before e, minus after c is supposed to help us spell correctly, but it only reliably determines the type of word that includes receive And Superior. That’s a good quick reminder for this common pattern, but keep in mind that there are many exceptions to this “rule,” such as grip, height, And in …
When used to start a list of two or more things, it is common to give preference to Firstly via Firstly today, but this preference is one of customs and usage, not grammar. Both Firstly And Firstly can function as adverbs, but they are not completely interchangeable; for example, we never say “firstly of all.” …
Start the question means “to elicit a particular question in the form of a response or response” and can often be replaced by “a question asking for an answer.” However, a less commonly used and more formal definition is “to ignore a question under the assumption that it has been answered.” The phrase itself comes …
What’s not to like about this word? alike? The short answer to that question is “a lot.” Alike has been a particular source of annoyance for those who are annoyed by the language habits of others: while most offensive words, such as despitefind a single major and stick with it, alike annoying people in two …
The English language has a lot of synonyms and we have a seemingly unnecessary number of words for many particular things or qualities. Some of these redundancies, such as duplicates pervert And warbler, is the result of two separate native languages; others, such as the hundreds of words we have for drunkbest explained by a …
It is perfectly acceptable to start a sentence with And (also do the same with words like But or or). use And at the beginning of a sentence has been a practice for over a thousand years. Whether a person should avoid using certain words at the beginning of a sentence is one of those …
While many people believe that jealous means fear someone will take what you have, and jealous means desire for what another has, historical usage shows that both mean “desire” and are interchangeable when describing another’s desire to possess. However, when it comes to romantic feelings, only jealous can be used to mean “doubtful possession,” as …
You can create a Venn diagram of “people who use words .” wandering And crop” and “those who are worried about whether they are using wandering And crop exactly” it would be an almost perfect circle. There is a good reason for the confusion: for a considerable time, both meant the same thing. Both words …
escapethe meaning of the word is shifting to “a small destination wedding” whereas in the past it meant “to run away and get married in secret”, and before that it was “for a married woman who ran away with new lover”, and even before that it just meant “escape or run away” with no romantic …
Famous means “widely known.” scandal does not mean “not famous” but rather it means “having a reputation of the worst kind.” It may help to remember that blasphemy related to infamous means “a bad reputation created by some serious crime.” Maybe you’re one of those people who looked up the word blasphemy because you can’t …
In today’s usage, indifferent usually means “unbiased”, while not interested simply means “don’t care.” Interestingly, when these words were first introduced, their meanings were reversed, with indifferent originally meant “lack of interest,” and not interested means “unbiased.” When the control panel used for the 1985 version of Harper’s Dictionary of Contemporary Usage were asked whether …
Shelf And break in phrases like “(w)rack one’s brain” have been used interchangeably so often that it is fine to use both spellings. However, some commentators use suggested use shelf in the phrases “brain-chilling” and “nervous” and save break for images related to boats and storms, such as “devastating storm” and “devastating and devastation.” Quick …
Words that are “borrowed” into English from other languages become naturalized English words and follow the rules of English grammar—regular. A problem can occur when the borrowed word is a noun ending in . -S but is singular in its original language: such a word will always sound like a plural to an English speaker. …
beveragepronounced “SHER-but,” is the buzzword for a sweet, frozen dessert made from fruit or fruit juice. Sherbertwith an addition r in the second syllable and pronounced “SHER-bert,” is less commonly used. In the UK, beverage is a monosodium glutamate used to foam drinks or to eat. On a hot summer day, there’s nothing like a …
the difference between finished And complete unclear to many people. These two words are used interchangeably by a large portion of the English-speaking population, often following the word Iand used to indicate that the speaker has completed some task, episode or other thing. There’s a very good chance that some of you reading this may …
