It began with friends from London who spend the winter in Central Florida and the Royal Mail that dutifully forwarded The Sunday Times to them. When they were finished, they passed the paper along to ...

From phrases like ‘Bob’s your uncle’ to ‘swings and roundabouts’, British English is full of sayings and expressions that appear to make little sense. But for refugees and asylum seekers arriving in ...

During midnight walks, Francis Grose collected phrases in London’s slums and dockyards. BBC Culture celebrates the man who revelled in the vulgar tongue. He was a muse to Robert Burns; a soldier with ...

THE illustrations form a noteworthy characteristic of this dictionary; for, as the title-page states, there are coloured plates, monotones, duograph charts and maps. The dictionary proper is preceded ...

The British and Americans have never gotten along very well where the English language is concerned. British mockery and indignation over what Americans were doing with and to the language began long ...

VANCOUVER—Consider this sentence: After years of living it up in the big city, Johnny and his batchmate had a hard time adjusting to life in the boondocks. Both “batchmate” and “boondocks” are used by ...

Americans today pronounce some words more like Shakespeare than Brits do… but it’s in 18th-Century England where they’d really feel at home. It makes for a great story: when settlers moved from ...

There is little that irks British defenders of the English language more than Americanisms, which they see creeping insidiously into newspaper columns and everyday conversation. But bit by bit British ...