Two Spanish psychologists and a German neurologist have recently shown that the brain that activates when a person learns a new noun is different from the part used when a verb is learnt. The ...

We have two new entries here, both present participles of verbs that might or might not exist. First is “efforting.” YourDictionary.com has one of the few online definitions, which consists entirely ...

An error has occurred. Please try again. With a Lewiston Sun Journal subscription, you can gift 5 articles each month. It looks like you do not have any active ...

As a linguist, I’ve lost count of how many times I have been asked what I think of the various language-learning apps. The truth is that I don’t use them. But of late I have been watching my daughter, ...

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 ...

Linguists have long believed that the sound of a word reveals nothing about its meaning, with a few exceptions of words like “buzz” or “beep” that are known as onomatopoeia. But a new study analyzing ...

Every few weeks, I get another missive from a reader angry about the common use of certain nouns as verbs. The most frequent irritant is "to impact", which annoys conservatives, but people have also ...