Learn English
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Posted by Liz Potter 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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Posted by Orin Hargraves 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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Posted by Liz Potter 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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Posted by Beth Penfold 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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Posted by Orin Hargraves on April 24, 2012
Though it has never been discovered, there must be, resting somewhere on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, a box of words that lost their way in the perilous journey from British to American English, or in some cases, in the reverse direction. This would handily explain the disparities among a number of compound terms [...]
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Posted by Liz Potter 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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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 16, 2012
Stan’s recent post on poppycock, bunkum, and similar words includes a huge collection of synonyms. They’re not identical in every respect: there are differences in regional distribution (some are used very widely, others only locally), in register (some being more formal, others verging on the offensive), and in currency (with some fading from use, and [...]
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Posted by Liz Potter 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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Posted by Orin Hargraves on April 10, 2012
Michael Rundell noted in his post a couple of weeks ago that there was a clear British/American divide in the use of the expression “Thanks a bunch”: it’s often used sincerely in American English, but ironically in British. That distinction, in one respect, is the tip of an iceberg: the iceberg of adverbial modification. In [...]
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Posted by Liz Potter 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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