Featuring Latinate and Celtic words, weasel words and nonce-words, ancient words ('loaf') to cutting edge ('twittersphere') and spanning the indispensable words that shape our …
The International Bestseller - Featured on BBC Radio 4Love it or hate it, the exclamation mark has been with us from Beowulf to the spam email - an enthusiastic history for …
Why is there an 'h' in ghost? William Caxton, inventor of the printing press and his Flemish employees are to blame: without a dictionary or style guide to hand in fifteenth …
Swearing, it turns out, is an incredibly useful part of our linguistic repertoire. Not only has some form of swearing existed since the earliest humans began to communicate, but it …
Welcome to Europe as you've never known it before, seen through the peculiarities of its languages and dialects. Combining linguistics and cultural history, Gaston Dorren takes us …
In his groundbreaking new book Daniel Everett seeks answers to questions that have perplexed thinkers from Plato to Chomsky: when and how did language begin? what is it? and what …
Language is a wild animal: rough, ambiguous, inconsistent in countless ways. But that just makes it all the more tempting to tame it. Many have tried, from sticklers for supposedly …
This 'engaging history of punctuation' (Wall Street Journal) is not only the first history of its kind, but a complete guide on how to use English punctuation. Behind every …
The world's greatest authority on language explains the secrets and subtleties of the grammar of English. David Crystal explores its history and varieties, explains its rules and …
An entertaining collection of strange, delightful and unexpectedly apt words from the origins of English, which illuminates the lives, beliefs and habits of our linguistic …
