In the United States, Presidents’ Day is traditionally celebrated during a three-day weekend in February. And the story behind this important commemorative holiday is more interesting than you might think—especially considering Presidents’ Day isn’t the official name of the holiday at all. Presidents’ Day was first established in 1885 to honor the February 22 birthday of our mythic first president and dollar bill cover model, …
The English language is famously full of confusing and often contradictory spelling conventions. You know it’s bad when misspell itself is one of the most common misspellings! To identify the words that consistently give people trouble, we analyzed Dictionary.com search data to compile this list of the most commonly misspelled words. For each word, we prepared tips to help you remember how to spell it …
Lately, a particular word game known as Wordle has been all the rage online. If you haven’t heard the good word about Wordle, it’s a game created by and named after puzzle fan Josh Wardle that challenges you to name a particular five-letter word with only six guesses. With each guess, any letter that isn’t in the mystery word is shaded gray, a letter that …
You don’t need us to tell you that spelling words correctly is not always easy. For evidence, you only need to look at the word mispelled … and then look again because we just misspelled it! But even when you get everything just right, sometimes things just feel off. There are certain words out there that—even when all of the I’s are dotted and T’s …
Dictionary Week continues with Word Pain Day, an occasion to recognize that, despite all its beauty and wonder, navigating the English language can be filled with angst and uncertainty. It’s a day for anyone who’s ever been done wrong by the pitfalls of grammar, spelling, and pronunciation (which, let’s be honest, is all of us). Never fear—we’ve got a whole lineup of activities, events, and …
Should we keep the pineapple and pizza seperate from each other, or should we keep them separate from each other? What is the correct way to spell this tricky word? In this article, we’ll narrow down the correct spelling of separate and share a tip on how to spell separate, separated, and separation correctly every time. Is it seperate or separate? The word separate—with two a’s—is …
Is the element with atomic number 13 called aluminum or aluminium? Why does one element have two names? In this article, we’ll look at how two different names came to refer to the same element. Is it aluminium or aluminum? The metallic element with the atomic number 13 is used in a wide variety of everyday objects, such as in cans, kitchen utensils, and foil …
English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, and you’ll find its more than 1 billion speakers just about everywhere. (It’s fun to note that scientists have even taken the English language to Antarctica!) But there are two particular groups of English speakers we’ll focus on in this article — and they are the ones who live on both sides of …
It’s a commonly misused phrase, and it’s also commonly misspelled. Is it per se or per say? The confusion might be due to the phrase’s Latin origin, which is a big hint as to which spelling is the right one. In this article, we’ll reveal the correct spelling of the term, define it, explain its Latin origin and meaning, and provide examples of how it …
The words gauge and gage are pronounced the same and differ by only one letter. So what’s the difference? In this article, we’ll define the words gauge and gage, explain how they are typically used, and provide example sentences. The words gauge and gage have the same pronunciation ([ geyj ], rhymes with page). Gauge is the far more commonly used word. It has multiple …
Do the words embed and imbed mean different things or not? In this article, we’ll look at the meanings of the words embed and imbed, explain whether they’re used in different ways, and also cover the forms embedded, imbedded, embedding, and imbedding. Embed has many different meanings. It’s most commonly used as a verb meaning “to fix into a surrounding mass” (embed stones in cement) …
You probably already know that English features many, many words with silent letters—letters that appear in the word but aren’t pronounced and often make us wonder what they are even doing there. For example, the letter B in the words debt and thumb. Or whatever the heck is going on in the words colonel, queue, and bourgeoisie. Even though you’re probably already familiar with silent letters, …
