May 23, 2025
Titles like “Mrs.,” “Ms.,” “Miss,” and “Mr.” are called courtesy titles, and they’re used before someone’s name to show respect to that person. “Mr.” is, of course, the only masculine title on that list, leaving not one, not two, but Read more…
May 15, 2025
When you use an acronym in your writing, do you need to spell out what it stands for every time? Wouldn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of using the acronym in the first place? Some acronyms are very well-known, Read more…
May 8, 2025
We’ve talked about a lot of acronym things on here, including the difference between acronyms and initialisms, what a redundonym is, how to pluralize acronyms, whether an acronym needs periods, and whether “a” or “an” comes before an acronym. But Read more…
April 10, 2025
Subject-verb agreement is easy enough on the surface: Singular subjects need singular verbs, and plural subjects need plural verbs. But things can get a little bit tricky when you start talking about multiple subjects, collective nouns, interference from predicate nouns, Read more…
Subjects and verbs are some of the most important elements in a sentence. If I’m being honest, they’re probably THE most important parts of a sentence—after all, you need both of them to even form the sentence in the first Read more…
March 24, 2025
Dictionaries are constantly changing! As people invent new words and change old ones, dictionaries add and update entries. If a new kind of technology is invented, its name needs to go in the dictionary. When new slang words pop up, Read more…
Want to impress your friends with some ridiculously and perhaps unnecessarily long words? This is the list for you! The 190,000-Letter Word Number of Letters: 189,819 Definition: Yep, there’s a word out there that’s almost 190,000 letters long. Technically speaking, Read more…
March 17, 2025
I use the dictionary a LOT. When I type “m” into the search bar, my computer automatically fills in “merriam-webster.com.” Most of the time, the words I’m searching are ones that I haven’t heard before or rarely use, but there Read more…
March 15, 2025
Adverbs are the more complicated cousin of adjectives. Whereas adjectives serve a fairly straightforward purpose—they limit or describe a noun—adverbs have a more diverse range of functions. Their primary purpose is to modify verbs, but they can also modify adjectives, Read more…
“Preposition” is one of those grammar words that seems to be thrown around a lot but never actually clearly explained. Sometimes people seem to (incorrectly) use it as the catch-all: When all the other words in a sentence have been Read more…