Rearing our unusually underdeveloped young may account for the evolution of language. Michael Marshall is intrigued, but ...

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” observed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922. We might ask, accordingly, how does language shape reality, arbitrating human experience of ...

Scientists say they have made an atlas of where words' meanings are located in the brain. The map shows that words are represented in different regions throughout the brain's outer layer. To make the ...

So random, and yet so normal. Letters tend to generate expressions. “OK” started in Jacksonian America with a jolly ...

The memory and meaning in our weird, family-specific words, often born of the wild minds of children.

(RNS) — In 1712, Jonathan Swift, the Anglican clergyman most famous for his brilliant satire, published “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue.” Complaining that the ...

’em or 😡 ’em, emojis are embedded in our 21st century culture. Over 90 percent of the world’s 3.2 billion Internet users regularly send these “picture characters,” as the word means in Japanese, with ...

“Stop gaslighting me,” I joked to my brother. He rolled his eyes, “That’s not what the word ‘gaslighting’ means.” “Stop gaslighting me about gaslighting!” I yelled back. Merriam-Webster has just ...