Tag archives: spelling
Lie or lay? Laying down the law on some puzzling verbs
Can you declare, hand on heart, that you always use the verbs lie and lay correctly? You don’t say? Does that go for all the tenses and forms of those verbs? There’s an abundance of evidence in every type of writing, from journalism to legal reports, that many English speakers are all at sea when [...]
Confessions of a pedant
We all know what a taxi is There are two big problems about working for a dictionary. The first is that everyone assumes you know the meaning of every word, which is setting the bar rather high. There are about 600,000 words and senses in the OED. Any one of them could crop up at [...]
Spelling can be a hot potatoe
The 2012 presidential election is but a little more than nine months away, which means that there are a host of candidates all furiously vying for the attention of the public and the money of the donors. Many of these candidates are speaking extemporaneously a good deal, and as is inevitable in such cases, gaffes [...]
What were the most looked-up words in 2011?
In our occasional search monitor series, we take a look at your most searched-for words of the past month. But what were your top look-ups for the past year? Below is a word cloud containing the top 300 most looked-up words in our free online dictionary. Hover over the words to find out more or [...]
Spelling: as easy as ABC?
Spelling. It’s a great leveller. The most academically decorated can find it difficult, and someone without a single formal qualification can find it as easy as, well, as easy as ABC. If you are lucky enough to be in the latter category, it can be bewildering to encounter others who are not equally as adept [...]
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![Who's confident [confidant?] about using -ance, -ence, and](http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/ant-ent-60x60.jpg "Who's confident [confidant?] about using -ance, -ence, and")
