Tag archives: verbs
Grisly bears and grizzly murders?
Most of us would agree that English spelling can be a minefield: one reason for this is that there are numerous words which sound the same when you say or hear them but which are spelled differently and which have completely different meanings: a few examples are pour/pore, flower/flour, and sight/site. Such words are known [...]
Meddling with nouns: who’s medalling now?
In the last fortnight, the Oxford English Dictionary saw a massive spike in searches for the verb ‘medal’. Searches for ‘medal’ on our free Oxford Dictionaries Online site also increased dramatically at the end of July and have remained high for two weeks. While we at Oxford Dictionaries couldn’t possibly comment on the reason for [...]
Faceoff: ‘he’, ‘he or she’, ‘he/she’, ‘s/he’ versus ‘they’
I enjoy reading your comments on Oxford’s blog posts: they provide an invaluable insight into your language concerns, likes, and dislikes. Your remarks strengthen my awareness that we have a sophisticated and grammatically knowledgeable audience: this keeps me on my toes, to say the least. Of course, I always aim to stay within the bounds [...]
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 [...]
Grammar myths #3: Don’t know nothing about double negatives? Read on…
Is there a specific grammatical slip that’s guaranteed to make you wince? I bet there is! While it’s hard to say why certain linguistic errors cause our hackles to rise rather than others, everyone has their own bête noire. You could split your infinitives till kingdom come and I wouldn’t bat an eyelid, but whenever [...]
Participles, and how not to dangle them…
True confessions time: back in the dim and distant days when I first embarked on lexicography, I was tasked with drafting potted biographies of famous people. In trying to be succinct, I had a rather bad habit of writing in the following vein: ‘Born in Russia, his most famous opera is …’ The problem stems [...]
-ize or -ise?
Many people visiting the World (non-US) version of our website ask us why we spell words such as realize, finalize, and organize with ‘-ize’ spellings, rather than ‘-ise’. There’s a widespread belief that these spellings belong only to American English, and that British English should use the ‘-ise’ forms instead, i.e. realise, finalise, and organise. [...]
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 [...]
Blog categories
- Competitions and quizzes (27)
- Dictionaries and lexicography (121)
- English in use (318)
- Grammar and writing help (59)
- Interactive features (46)
- OED Appeals (4)
- Other languages (55)
- Varieties of English (31)
- Word origins (162)
- Word trends and new words (96)
