The Christian Science Monitor

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It’s impressive how educational hand-drying the dishes can be. Almost without knowing it, one may absorb a range of more or less useful information as the cutlery gets drier and the dishcloth damper. I am thinking in particular of two literary dish t

The Christian Science Monitor

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Many Scandinavians frown on tipping, and they’re not too keen on please or thanks (as English-speakers think of them) either.

NPR

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Listener Gabrielle Sweets plays the puzzle with puzzlemaster Will Shortz and NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

The Paris Review

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In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. ©Tom Toro There are so many ways to pin a sen

The Christian Science Monitor

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The more research I did into the history of fulsome, the more confused I became. This slippery word has distinct, sometimes contradictory meanings.

The Atlantic

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As soon as Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy, people noted a few of his linguistic quirks, such as the extended, supervowel pronunciation of huge and the references to himself in the third person. But beyond those, the version of Engl

NPR

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On-air Challenge: I'm going to read you some sentences. Each sentence contains two words that have homophones that are opposites. Ex. Does Liv Ullmann dye her hair? --> LIVE & DIE (homophones of "Liv" and "dye") 1. In London, bar patrons who misuse

Futurity

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Some of the similarities among human languages may have roots in the brain’s preference for efficient information processing, a new study suggests. “If we look at languages of the world, they are very different on the surface, but they also share a l

The Atlantic

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It’s nearly impossible to discern when an infant’s babbling turns into a fully formed word.

Games World of Puzzles

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Below are seven messages—pithy sayings, fascinating facts, and a cartoon gag—that have been translated into simple cipher alphabets. Letter substitutions remain constant throughout any one cipher, but change from one cipher to the next; the level of

Home

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and took a boat trip to the tiny volcanic island of Nea Kameni. Our tour guide was a modern-day Greek god. The women swooned. His smile was straight out of a toothpaste advert and he sprinted up the hill to the lookout point with a grin on his face,

Games World of Puzzles

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From the beginning of the game until the end, the primary goal on each turn is to score points. And while there are many ways to do this, none is so frequently lucrative as the “bingo,” the play that uses all seven of your tiles, meriting a 50-point

TIME

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LEARNING A SECOND LANGUAGE IS TRICKY AT ANY age (and it only gets tougher the longer you wait to crack open that dusty French book). Now, in a new study, scientists have pinpointed the exact age at which your chances of reaching fluency in a second l

The Christian Science Monitor

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English has so many creative ways to proclaim that something is ‘nonsense.’ Part 2 of a series on the nuts and bolts of humorous words.

The Guardian

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Do you know how to say apropos? What about awry? We want to know which words you’ve mispronounced – and how you found out your mistake

Nautilus

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To adults learning a second language, it hardly seems fair: As they stumble their way through conjugation drills, fret over grammar textbooks, and fill in worksheets on constructing subordinate clauses, their children sop up the language while finger

New Zealand Woman’s Weekly

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Join classes and nurture curiosity with one or two new hobbies each year – dance, take up a foreign language or learn how to invest. Before you feel let down, explain your expectations. Don’t be afraid to delegate.

Cruise International

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Are you familiar with the term OBC? Do you know your port side from your leeward? And what on earth should you do if you’re experiencing a little resfeber, or even worse a bout of eleutheromania? I have always been intrigued by language, and, like ev

Shooting Gazette

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Dear Uncle Giles, My shoot will welcome several overseas teams this season, and among those teams there will be some Guns who don’t speak English. How can I make sure the days are welcoming but also run smoothly? M.D. deT by email Uncle Giles wri

Games World of Puzzles

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Below are seven messages—pithy sayings, fascinating facts, and a cartoon gag—that have been translated into simple cipher alphabets. Letter substitutions remain constant throughout any one cipher, but change from one cipher to the next; the level of

Futurity

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Language acquisition between birth and 18 is a remarkable feat of cognition, rather than something humans are just hardwired to do, according to new research. Researchers have calculated that, from infancy to young adulthood, learners absorb approxim

The Christian Science Monitor

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In 2007, the editors of the Oxford Junior English Dictionary banished a bevy of terms describing the natural world.

NPR

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On-air Challenge: Today's puzzle is all about "me." Specifically, every answer is a word or name in which the accented syllable "me," in any spelling, appears somewhere inside it. Example: Serving to fix or correct things --> REMEDIAL 1. Person who t

The Atlantic

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Even when she taps into the colloquial vernacular that’s characteristic of her Oklahoma roots, the Democratic presidential candidate risks appearing inauthentic.

Games World of Puzzles

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If you remove all the vowels from your first name and then add new vowels anywhere among the remaining consonants, can you get a new word? How about your last name? Well, we know 12 famous people who can do this vowel play with each of their names, a

NPR

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Detroit, Havana and Mexico City come together in the group's bilingual double album, Telephone/Teléfono. The twin songs "Hummingbird" and "Colibrí" illustrate the power of lyrics in translation.

NPR

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NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Weekend Edition puzzlemaster Will Shortz play a word game with WCBE listener Todd LaPlace of Dublin, Ohio.

Creative Nonfiction

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WINNER! Best Essay Prize M.G. LEIBOWITZ lives in New York, New York. Her poetry has recently appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Foundry, and The Journal. She is the recipient of CALYX Journal’s 2016 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Pri

The Christian Science Monitor

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These phrases mean the same thing. Are they both correct, or are the newspapers getting it wrong about half the time?

NPR

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NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro plays the puzzle with New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz and KUT listener Cory Sureck of Austin, Texas.