Two-Letter Words to play on Scrabble Day

Any time you play Scrabble against a serious competitive player you can expect them to offer up words such as xu, and zo with a surprising degree of confidence. These words may be seldom encountered outside the popular board game, but two-letter words are… Read More

Lucy Mangan is back with your new word submissions, perfect for wet and rainy Easter holidays!

I’m away for Easter with my son at the moment and I am delighted to be able at last – courtesy of new and, as you will shortly see, aptly named contributor HADDOCK – to put a name to his preferred activity; he is spending much of his time… Read More

Pi Day, Empire 2.0, and Oxford Comma: March’s Words in the News

There’s always room for pi, even though it has an infinite number of digits, and March is the month of pi day, at least in the United States. Americans list their dates in the Month, Day, Year format, so the 14th of March is abbreviated 3.14. Geddit? The US has… Read More

‘Smellfie’ , ‘elpistostegalians’ and ‘moaniac’ – Lucy Mangan delves into your head scratching range of word submissions.

I’m not sure that if you are a North American coyote-wolf hybrid coywolf (submitted by AustinAllegro) is the way to go. “Wolfote” might perhaps strike a little more fear in the hearts of your enemies. “Coyote-wolf hybrid” even more. “Woyote” was apparently tried as an early term, but I… Read More

World Scrabble Champion, Brett Smitheram, shares his top 5 Scrabble tips on Scrabble Day

The name of Alfred Mosher Butts might not mean much to you, but the Architect, born today in 1899 has been the direct cause of family feuds, inspired moments of verbal dexterity and genuine curiosity about language since 1938. Perhaps however if I mix in images of red, pink, blue… Read More

We take a look at the word ‘parity’ for International Women’s Day

To mark International Women’s Day this month, people are being urged to make a ‘pledge for parity’ to remove inequality form the workplace. The choice of the word parity in this slogan gives it a pleasant alliteration, but it is also a more formal word and is more suggestive… Read More

‘Snackadium’, ‘nerd prom’, and ‘three-line whip’: February’s Words in the News

What a difference a month makes. And in this case, that difference is zero. The same topics that dominated the news in January, dominated in February. Perhaps we simply have to get used to this. But it’s not all doom and gloom. One light-hearted new word that… Read More

‘Kalette’, ‘mammophant’ and ‘nooch’ – Lucy Mangan takes a look at your latest word contributions

Let’s start with the good news, shall we? It won’t take long. Mammoths are back! Nearly! Sort of. Sort of nearly. No, not nearly. But maybe, one day, almost as many years from now as they have currently been absent. Let us not concern ourselves with details. The important thing… Read More

How the Collins Thesaurus is compiled

The Collins Thesaurus has been compiled with reference to the Collins Corpus, a unique database of over 4.5 billion words which enables our experienced lexicographers to research current usage and how language is changing. The Collins Corpus contains material gathered from a wide variety of sources such as… Read More