Language Lovers

New Words Published in October

What geekery is this? New words added to CollinsDictionary.com in October include X factor, Tardis-like and posterize. Ridic? A huge number of excellent new words and meanings have been submitted to CollinsDictionary.com in the last few months. Here are the words that were accepted for… Read More

What’s your word?

Submit your new word here We’ve all had them: those words and phrases that mean the world to us. They’re passed around our friends, providing meaning, sense and clarity where before there was only confusion. But there was never any way of making these words official,… Read More

New Words Published in September

In July 2012 CollinsDictionary.com started accepting new word suggestions from anyone who wants to be part of the evolution of the English language. Our hard-working dictionary editors have been busy sorting through thousands of entries since then. Here are the eighty-six new words and senses that were added to CollinsDictionary.com… Read More

How does a word get into CollinsDictionary.com?

Every word that enters the Collins Dictionary is reviewed by our editors before inclusion. Whether it’s a word that has been floating around the verges of common parlance for years, or one that you’ve just coined and submitted yourself, the word will always go through this review process. Our editors… Read More

Anglo-Saxon Words

Old English, or Anglo-Saxon as it is also known, is the oldest form of English. The original speakers of ‘English’ came from the part of Europe that is now Germany and Denmark in the form of three tribes called the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. The three tribes had… Read More

Words from French

The Impact of French on English: Language of the Ruling Classes The main period for the introduction of French words into English was after the Norman Conquest of 1066. For the next 300 or so years, the language of the royal court, and therefore of authority, was Norman,… Read More

Words from Arabic

The Arabic influence on the English of science, mathematics and cuisine The Muslim conquest and settlement of al-Andalus came when Europe was in the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire when much of the knowledge of the ancient Roman and Greek worlds… Read More

Spelling Rules

Twelve Top Spelling Tips Here is our list of the spelling tips we think you will find most useful. They provide an explanation of the English language’s key spelling rules (and their exceptions) and if you can bear them in mind you should be able to improve your spelling. Read More

Commonly Confused Words

When two words are confused for one another the results can sometimes be comical, for example when affluent is confused with effluent or desert with dessert. On other occasions mix-ups between commonly confused words can result in a situation that isn’t so funny, for example… Read More