While compiling the Oxford English Dictionary, lexicographer James Murray exchanged hundreds of letters a week with authors, advisors, and volunteer researchers. A new collection online lets you eavesdrop on discussions about which words should be...
Thanks to a project led by Professor Charlotte Brewer of Oxford University and research fellow Stephen Turton of Cambridge, you can now enjoy a trove of letters between James Augustus Henry Murray and his many correspondents during his work on what...
Polly from Issaquah, Washington, grew up in Washington, D.C., where she and her family used the term food store to mean “grocery store.” However, a friend from the Midwest teases her about this. Does anyone else call a grocery store a...
Throwing cheese and shaky cheese are two very different things. In baseball, hard cheese refers to a powerful fastball, and probably comes from a similar-sounding word in Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi. Shaky cheese, on the other hand, is the grated...
Jules in Washington, D.C., is puzzled when a speaker at a meeting says the gathering will be covered by Chatham House Rules. Correctly said there’s just one Chatham House Rule, and it’s named after Chatham House, a think tank and...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle features sentences that include a short word that anagrams to another word, and is defined by yet another word in the sentence. For example, if the clue is I can get no research done because the room is so...