From the category archives:

improve your English

  • Language tip of the week: possibility

    Posted by on May 10, 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 language tip is about the patterns that follow the noun possibility. The noun possibility is never followed [...]

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  • Ins and outs

    Posted by on May 08, 2012

    English has a jumbled inheritance of words from many sources; the pie chart shows a statistical analysis based on dictionary etymologies. Even simple contrasting word pairs, such as in and out, may come from different sources: in is a Latinate word, and out is Germanic. Despite their disparate origins, you can usually count on words [...]

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  • Language tip of the week: develop

    Posted by on May 03, 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 language tip is about how to spell the inflections of develop. Don’t write the -ed and -ing [...]

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  • Language tip of the week: Corp. or corps?

    Posted by on April 26, 2012

    In this weekly post, we bring English language learners useful tips on tricky areas of the language. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about the differences in pronunciation between Corp. and corps. Here in the UK, there [...]

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  • Language tip of the week: whether or if?

    Posted by on April 19, 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 language tip is about the differences in use between whether and if. Both whether and if can [...]

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  • Language tip of the week: whether

    Posted by on April 12, 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 language tip is about two words that are easily confused, whether and weather. Notice the spelling of [...]

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  • Language tip of the week: happy

    Posted by on April 05, 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 language tip helps with the spelling of nouns whose related adjective ends in ‘y’. Although the adjective [...]

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  • What do people ‘like to say’ – and what do they ‘like saying’?

    Posted by on April 04, 2012

    This post comes from guest blogger Heng-ming Carlos Kang of the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. It is based on a talk that Carlos gave at the recent Asia-Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference in New Zealand. Have you noticed any difference between what people like to say and what they like [...]

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  • Language tip of the week: difference

    Posted by on March 29, 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 language tip helps with the grammatical patterns of the noun difference. When you are talking about a [...]

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  • Whose bright idea was this? Irony and dictionaries

    Posted by on March 22, 2012

    In his recent post on speech acts, Orin made the point that “many of these formulas … can be used to convey a meaning very different from the one they’re usually used for; sometimes just the opposite”. A good example is the expression Yeah, right, which people use to signal that they don’t believe what [...]

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