Newspaper headlines have the task of trying to convey the essence of a story in a very short space...
Author - Stephen Bullon
Plain English Awards 2011
It’s the Plain English Awards season again, as Stan Carey noted in his recent post, and...
Christmas customs
In the UK, our bringer of Christmas presents spends the night of December 24th coming down chimneys...
Getting lippy for Thanksgiving
It was Thanksgiving last Thursday, and traffic from the US to the dictionary site was down by 50%...
You turning?
Last week’s favourite entry on the Open Dictionary, reverse ferret, is a colourful way of...
A class of our own
What do you call the meal you eat in the evening? Is it tea, supper, or dinner? And in the middle...
Trick or treat?
Today is Halloween. All over North America, in the UK, and in other countries, children will be...
The changing meaning of machines
There has been a huge increase in the number of look-ups of the compound noun change machine over...
Recycling language
In the month leading up to 9th, October there was a 500% increase in the number of people looking...
In search of muppets
One of the most looked up words in the last week is muppet. Our dictionary entry says it’s an...