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Pearls before Swine

Recently the consumer research company Perspectus Global commissioned a survey about English phrases. They asked 2,000 people aged 18 to 50 whether they used any of a list of fifty expressions. The list was ranked with the least used phrases at the top. Thus, 78 per cent of respondents said… Read More
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7 Shakespearean words to add to your vocabulary

It’s English Language Day! The annual event where language lovers come together to celebrate the great William Shakespeare and a chance to celebrate multilingualism in English-speaking countries around the globe. We’re celebrating with this list of 7 Shakespearean words to weave into your vocabulary. Without further ado, let us go… Read More

The Longest Word in the Collins English Dictionary

This post was originally published on 4th April 2012 and updated on 21st July 2020. What is the Longest Word in the Collins English Dictionary? The longest word listed in Collins English Dictionary* is dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, which is the full name of the chemical DDT. It has 31 letters. In… Read More

You’ve got to accentuate the positive

At long last some semblance of life as it was BC (before Coronavirus) is returning or soon will. Shops have reopened. As of last week, garden centres are welcoming customers back, as are zoos, safari parks and outdoor visitor attractions. Dentists in England can carry out routine treatments. On… Read More

‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves

What do these five words have in common: screenager, Reaganomics, Joementum, flexitarian and brunch? Well done! I knew you would know. And you didn’t even need to go into Only Connect mode. The answer, of course, is they are all portmanteau words, that is,… Read More

Happiness is…

What is happiness? Answers vary according to which religion or creed you cleave to. For an Epicurean it might be ataraxia, a state of supreme calmness. For Stoics, it might be virtue. For Miss Crawford in Mansfield Park, ‘A large income is the best recipe for… Read More
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What is #love anyway?

Every year on the fourteenth of February the world celebrates the idea of love. If you look up ‘love’ in Collins English Dictionary, you will find the word defined as ‘an intense emotion of affection, warmth, fondness, and regard towards a person or thing’. But love also appears in… Read More

What put the corona in the coronavirus?

If you had never heard of a coronavirus before this year, you certainly will have now. As alarm increases about the spread of a new strain of this virus around the world, some people have been wondering about the significance of the word ‘… Read More

How the Truth Got Cancelled

For many observers, the 2010s were the decade of fake news. In 2016, Donald Trump appeared to use the word ‘bigly’, which soon caught on as a humorously intensifying adverb, even though it turned out that Trump himself had actually said ‘big league’. And ‘bigly’ itself is attested as an… Read More
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