Think twice before you use words like “lackaday” or “nonplussed”—they may mean something quite different than what you’d assume.

Have you ever used the word access where you should have used excess? Or Have you got confused about which to use-affect or ...

This word looks and sounds like marionette, the stringed puppet, which is a pitfall to avoid, because it can lead you to believe that martinet means the exact opposite of what it actually means.

But there’s no denying that, as the popular, prevailing meanings of words change, they often drift farther and farther away from the “correct” meaning. 2 / 14 LightField Studios/Shutterstock ...

Splish-splash, boing, bang, thud, sparkle, and pitter-patter are all fun words to say — they also happen to sound exactly like their definition. A study published recently in the Journal of ...

The meaning behind words like ‘skibidi,’ ‘sigma ... Three teenage boys looks at their smartphone screens. FILE - In this photo illustration, a Tik Tok logo seen displayed on a smartphone.

The squiggly lines mean her research subject was stumped — repeatedly — by sentences like these: "I need a footstool for my gouse. She drinks milk from a gouse.

For whatever reason, at some point or another, you may have decided to say the same word over and over again. It might have been the word strange. That’s strange. Strange. Sssttt-Rrraaa-Nnn-Ggg-Eee.

Like most parents, we swear in front of them accidentally, and my daughters were just so curious about the words' meaning. It's such a big deal—they, like, freeze, or blush, and it's so impactful.

Indeed, in another link between first and last words, Mr Erard argues that dying people lose their verbal faculties in a way resembling the child’s language learning but in reverse.