J.P. in Temecula, California, is a high schooler studying French and Spanish. He notes that the Spanish word con means “with” and English has some linguistically related words, such as congress, which suggests “coming...
In Cockney rhyming slang, apples and pears is a synonym for “stairs,” and dustbin lids means kids. Plus, sniglets are clever coinages for things we don’t already have words for. Any guesses what incogsneeto means? It’s the...
Charlotte from Princeton, Kentucky, wonders: What’s the difference between a spider web and a cobweb? There’s a bit of semantic differentiation between the two: A cobweb is usually an old spider web, while a spider web that’s not...
In 1971, when a new public library opened in Troy, Michigan, famous authors and artists were invited to write letters to the city’s youngest readers, extolling the many benefits of libraries. One of the loveliest was from E.B. White, author of...
Hannah from Menominee, Wisconsin, says her father used to invite people to go for a drive with Let’s go for a scud. The verb to scud means “to move quickly,” or “to speed,” as in clouds scudding across the sky, and goes...
One of the most powerful words you’ll ever hear — and one of the most poignant — isn’t in dictionaries yet. But it probably will be one day. The word is endling, and it means “the last surviving member of a species.” The...