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, ...

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 ...

A reader from Coimbatore has sent in this query: “Is it possible for a verb to function as an adjective? Please explain it with some examples.” An adjective is a word that describes (modifies) a noun.

‘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 ...

Rebecca: I'm Rebecca, I'm a tutor at Morley College at Beck, in Rotherhithe in South London and I work with adults of all ages who want to improve their literacy skills. When we talk about words, we ...