Before 2006, I never gave much thought to nominalizations — noun forms like “beauty” and “the scheduling” that at heart are really adjectives like “beautiful” or verbs like “to schedule.” I was ...

Health care, healthcare or health-care? Make up, makeup or make-up? Water ski, water-ski or waterski? Cell phone, cellphone or cell-phone? A lot of questions posed in this column elicit the answer: ...

Often, just knowing the general meaning of a word is not enough to help students use the word correctly in a given situation. The features of the word that are embedded in the word ending can give ...

Sometime in the 20 th century, shit—having already long been a verb and then a noun—also became an adjective, as in He was a shit teacher or That restaurant has shit service. Exactly when this ...

Nouns are by far the largest category of words in English. They signify all kinds of physical things both living and inanimate. They also signify imagined things like ‘a ghost’; and ideas or concepts, ...

A teacher of English has sent in this query: “The participles of certain verbs function as adjectives in sentences. Many students find it difficult to distinguish between the adjectival and verbal ...

‘The’ is the most commonly used word in English. ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ uses all 26 letters of the English alphabet and is called a pangram. Most average adult English speakers ...

As a linguist, I’ve lost count of how many times I have been asked what I think of the various language-learning apps. The truth is that I don’t use them. But of late I have been watching my daughter, ...