Archive for June, 2012
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Posted by Gill Francis on June 18, 2012
The noun way (plural ways) is one of the most common nouns in English, as evidenced by corpus-based frequency lists. There are about 990 instances per million words in the British National Corpus (as compared with the most frequent noun time, with 1,635 instances). One very frequent sense of way is sense 1a) in Macmillan: [...]
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Posted by Liz Potter on June 15, 2012
This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on June 14, 2012
granular (adjective) (used about data and information) broken down into small separate items The association of group practice administrators asked CMS to provide more granular identification of all entities that fund, receive and administer insurance claims. (Submitted from the United Kingdom) Last week Orin Hargraves wrote a post here entitled “Going granular” about this very [...]
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Posted by Liz Potter on June 14, 2012
In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s tip is about confusion between the very similar phrases at the end and in the end. People [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on June 12, 2012
Anyone who reads, writes or edits will notice the great variation in people’s punctuation styles. Where some use dashes, others deploy colons. Some avoid semicolons; others use them at every opportunity. Hyphens are as much forgotten or ignored as they are adored with the passion of a proofreader. Many of us can relate to Gertrude [...]
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Posted by Robert Lane Greene on June 11, 2012
The “I wish X language had word W, which is so useful in Y” discussion is usually an invitation to submit fun and weird words that are highly specific and useful in language Y. For example, I did one post on great words that English lacks, and Danish provides two: flueknipper (literally, someone who, er, [...]
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Posted by Liz Potter on June 08, 2012
This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on June 07, 2012
aptonym (noun) (also aptronym) a person’s name that is appropriate to their job An example of an aptonym is the current UK Lord Chief Justice, whose name and title is Lord Judge. (Submitted from the United Kingdom) Doing a quick run-through of our bloggers and guest-bloggers I thought I might come up with at least [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on June 06, 2012
There was a time when the only things that were granular either were, or reminded you of, grains. Grains have been on the menu ever since humans discovered wild cereal plants and began to cultivate them, laying the foundations for that unstoppable behemoth that we call civilization. The current state of civilization, whatever its ills, [...]
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Posted by Katherine Barber on June 04, 2012
Our new guest blogger Katherine Barber was the editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary for 17 years. She blogs about language at katherinebarber.blogspot.com and about ballet at toursenlair.blogspot.com _____________ With Queen Elizabeth II celebrating the 60th anniversary of her coronation this weekend, it’s an opportune time to look at an unusual word that we don’t [...]
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