When lexicographers look at linguistic corpora, they find that the color name hazel is most often followed by the word brown. The descriptive term hazel blue, as in hazel blue eyes, is rarely used. If you ever get tired of using the word hazel, you...
Ian in Clyde, North Carolina, is puzzled when a colleague uses the term blue million, meaning “a large amount.” Along with words like zillion and gazillion, this expression functions as an indefinite hyperbolic numeral. Sometimes the word blue...
What’s the best way for someone busy to learn lots of new words quickly for a test like the GRE? Looking up their origins can help. Or, record yourself reading the words and definitions and play them back while you’re doing other chores. • Book...
A Canadian-born caller says her mother, who is from Britain, addresses her grandson as booby. In The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, researchers Iona and Peter Opie write that booby is a children’s term for “a foolish crybaby,” which may be...
You pick up what you think a glass of water and take a sip, but it turns out to be Sprite. What’s the word for that sensation when you’re expecting one thing and taste something else? Also, slang from college campuses, like ratchet and dime piece...
Plenty of lizards are scary looking, but that doesn’t make them scorpions. Even so, there are places like Western Virginia where the word scorpion is used to refer to a lizard, such as the five-lined skink, known for its distinctive blue tail. This...
