Eight-year-old Violet moved from Lexington, Kentucky to Zionsville, Indiana, and found other kids don’t share her pronunciation of sprinkles as ‘spræŋk(ə)ls, rhyming with “rankles.” Who’s right? This is part of a...
Jimmy and his high-school classmates wonder about the pronunciation of words like zooplankton, zoology, and zoological. The traditional pronunciation for many scientific terms that start with zoo- is to use a long o rather than an oo sound. The...
Fourteen-year-old Harry from Charlotte, Vermont, asks why we say something is clean as a whistle. The phrase refers not to a physical whistle, but to the purity of the sibilant sound. This is part of a complete episode.
Sloane, a 12-year-old from Omaha, Nebraska, is a bit anxious about starting middle school in the fall and wonders if there’s a single word that means “fear of middle school.” There are some long, rare words for the extreme fear of...
A middle-schooler from Bishop, California, pens a clever pangram about watching Netflix while under the weather. This is part of a complete episode.
A high-schooler in Indianapolis, Indiana, wonders why the word number is abbreviated as no. when there’s no letter O in the word. The answer lies in the Latin word numero, which is the ablative form of the Latin word for number, numerus. This...