Hyphens

The hyphen joins words or parts of words. Hyphens are used at the ends of lines where a word has been split, to warn the reader that the word continues on the next line. If the word you need to split is clearly made up of two or more smaller… Read More

French word of the week: qui

This series of weekly blogs takes a closer look at words from our French dictionaries. The word we're focusing on this week is the French pronoun 'qui'. Read More

Paris 2024™

Between 26 July and 11 August sports fans the world over will be abuzz as France hosts what is officially the twenty-third Olympiad™ – in Paris, in sixteen other sites across France and on French Tahiti, where the windsurfing competition will take place. In French, the games are… Read More

Commas

The comma marks a short pause between elements in a sentence. Main clauses that are joined together with and or but do not normally have a comma before the conjunction unless the two clauses have different subjects. You go out of the door and turn immediately left. It was cold outside, but we decided to… Read More

Quotation marks

Quotation marks are mainly used in direct speech. Direct speech gives the actual words that a speaker is using or has used. It is common in novels and other writing where the actual words of a speaker are quoted. In British English, these marks can also be called ‘inverted commas’. The… Read More