Tag archives: grammar
Affect versus effect
Every month, affect is one of the most searched-for words in Oxford Dictionaries Online. Its high ranking in our search logs is probably because a lot of people are confused about the difference between affect and effect, two words which have almost the same spelling, but very different meanings. The basic difference between them is [...]
Does English have a subjunctive?
Many creatures on earth are able to communicate with each other in various ways. Dogs wag their tails when they are happy, and cats purr. Bees can tell each other in which direction to search for nectar. What bees can’t say… However, animal communication is very limited. For example, bees can only communicate to other [...]
Random apostrophization strikes again!
The horror! The horror! Whilst battling through the Saturday afternoon crush in a local department store, I was confronted by the ghastly sight of a sign bearing a misused apostrophe – a little ‘eek’ escaped my lips, and it almost put me off my bargain-hunting mission: men’s pant’s What made it screamingly worse was that [...]
Blog categories
- Competitions and quizzes (26)
- Dictionaries and lexicography (116)
- English in use (303)
- Grammar and writing help (58)
- Interactive features (46)
- OED Appeals (4)
- Other languages (50)
- Varieties of English (28)
- Word origins (156)
- Word trends and new words (93)