10 American English Words To Baffle The Brits

Brits and Americans often have no trouble understanding one another. However, there are still a few words and phrases that remain completely unalike. 1. Cookie These are called biscuits in the UK. Cookie in US English comes from the Dutch koekje, a small crisp cake. Dutch settlers in… Read More

Fifteen High Scoring Scrabble Words That Include The Letter X

Discover the best Scrabble hints, tips and secrets by clicking on any of the book covers below: Although seeing the letter X arrive on your rack may not be the most pleasant of surprises, this… Read More

Lucy Mangan is LIMH at this week’s new CollinsDictionary.com word submissions!

Thank you, tyler.hartleb, thank you for supplying the abbreviation I have needed my whole digital life: ‘LIMH‘. It stands for “Laughing in my head” and thus at last gives an almost literally voiceless community a voice. Or at least a presence, which is actually all we really want. Read More

Instagram, Sahara Dust, and the Cambridge Factor – Trending Words April 2014

T S Eliot once called April “the cruellest month”, but that’s pretty harsh for a month that begins with April Fool’s Day and usually includes Easter. Okay, so some April Fool’s pranks can go a bit too far. We began the month with actor James Franco chatting up… Read More

Lucy Mangan is going on a ‘microadventure’. No ‘wackaging’ involved

We get the technology we deserve. In the pipeline (or it may be already here – my toddler is ill, I haven’t been outside for a week and I don’t know anyone over three or under 30 who can keep me up to date, so who knows what’s happening?) is… Read More

Some of the best words that never were

A user of this website recently left a comment asking why we had chosen to mark as ‘rejected’ a word that another user had submitted. After all, the word had been invented and used by that person, so surely it should be included in the dictionary. This… Read More

Super-G, Beer and Bingo – Trending Words in March 2014

March may be the first month of Spring, but there was no indication in the weather, or in the news cycle, at the beginning of the month. We started well enough with the Paralympic Games in Sochi, Russia, during which Kelly Gallagher of Northern Ireland and her… Read More

Lucy Mangan learns some new words from the Greek Orthodox Church, as well as a new type of pasta

So, it looks like there may be an English word for schadenfreude after all. According to WritersCramp, it’s ‘epicaricacy‘ and covers the same convulsion of joy in another’s misfortune that the Teutonic loan does. What we lose in “Tuh – trust the Germans to have a word for… Read More

Lucy Mangan considers ‘komorebi’, ‘sitzfleisch’, and the proper pronunciation of ‘dog’…

Thank you so much, Colin T. McDonough, for submitting ‘komorebi‘. It’s a Japanese word that means “sunlight that filters through the trees – the interplay between light and leaves”. It’s mentioned in many places as being one of those ‘untranslatable’ words – which is to say, ones whose… Read More