All Questions

This is a two-part question. A lot of British South Asian that are born and bred in the UK have a peculiar accent. It's very different than the familiar Indian accent too. So my question is... Is ...

A quick Internet search suggests that pied-piping in relative clauses was a natural feature of English even though it is loved by prescriptivists; it existed in older stages of the language, and it ...

I wonder why I need to know words like thereby, thereunto, wherewithal, hereonafter, thenceforward and others. I understand that I am unable to use them while writing an essay, because these words are ...

The hashtag 10yearchallenge is very trendy now, but the use of the compond adjective (10-year) makes it look like it's a challenge that spanned 10 years, however, it's the name of the challenge not an ...

A Forbes article -- apparently written by an American -- titled "How To Tell If A Wine Will Age" has this passage: The other structural elements of body, alcohol, and sugar can also point to an age-...

A lot of work I've been doing recently has been around the emergence of various gender identities. "Neutrois" recently came to my attention, with more information about it here: https://nonbinary....

There are many instances where by and with mean something completely different, but which is the correct preposition usage in the following sentences? A file by the same name as the original file. A ...

This question was originally posted here: What is the term for a word that has come to mean the opposite of its orignal meaning? I don't think it should have been marked as a duplicate: the "...

Is the use of 'There,' in the following sentence correct? This feels clunky to me. Austin went to France. There, some of the buildings were white and others were blue. Thank you!

"double standard" is a noun-phrase that means a set of principles that applies differently and usually more rigorously to one group of people or circumstances than to another ... I see an ...

'Fladry' is a comparatively recent adoption in English from Polish, with a putative origin in German. The Double-Tongued Dictionary gives this definition and partial etymology: fladry n.pl. a ...

Socrates lived in the 4th century (B.C.). My kids live in the 21st century, and so forth. What is the most concise way to reference a historical figure, like Livy, who lived from 59 B.C. to A.D. 17? ...

Do you think "update" means the person puts the new information over the existing one, so that the previous history can't be seen? I heard someone said "update" meant we cannot see the previous ...

I have been seeing increasing use of "membership to an organisation" (club, association etc.). The "to" makes my teeth grate, as I have always used "of". Should I continue to resist (I run a large ...

I've been taught that while proceeded by a comma means "whereas", and that when it is not, is interpreted to mean "at the same time". I wanted to ensure I was correct not to include a comma in the ...

I read a comment on licensing in another post, which made me revisit this concept. Unfortunately I'm away over the holidays, and haven't got access to CaGEL – only to its "little brother", A Student's ...

I have a question. How do I make an initialism out of a word/phrase with a number? For an example: Should Rainbow 6 Siege be R6S because of initialism is an abbreviation made of initial letters but 6 ...

I understand who and when can be used as adjective clause for sure like the following sentences. The time when is good for us to meet has not been decided. The person who is qualified for ...

I hate how we format dialogue. I believe convention has gotten too heavy and we need to think a little more about logic. That being said, my question, to be more specific, is asking about labels for ...

Sources available on line say that the expression “Cyber Monday” is just a few years old, dating its coinage to 2005: The term "Cyber Monday" was dreamt up in 2005 by a marketing team at Shop.org,...

Gun rights advocates claimed that the fault (lies or lay?) with people who have mental health issues.

My 90 year old father has a saying, "I've been dragged through an auger hole and beat with a sut rake." It means you're worn out or have been treated badly. "Sut" pronounced almost like "soot." Not ...

When invited, she gladly said yes. In the above sentence, my book says the sentence is formed because ‘she was’ is omitted. And the sentence is the example of ellipsis of the same subject + be in the ...

I'm trying to read my way through The Boy at Mugby by Charles Dickens. The story is written in an 'accented' language, and there are a few words I'm having trouble making out: (The text excerpts are ...

A previous question (What part of speech is 'why' ?) asked what function 'why' was playing when it is used with a verb. But 'why' can be used without a verb. Why the sad face ? So what is it ...

Has The New Yorker changed its "who"/"whom" policy? Recently, I noticed--for the first time in fifteen years of more or less consistent readership---two occasions I considered non-standard, both from ...

I am struggling with choosing the suitable pronoun in the following sentence. He wrote other / another two letters in just 15 minutes. My intuition tells me that in this case, ‘another’ is the ...

I had never heard "in the essence of time" before a recent trip to Virginia. Various local attendees of a meeting I attended used the phrase to justify moving on to a new topic, in a situation where I ...

In his 2013 TEDx Houston talk The tyranny of the rocket equation, astronaut and International Space Station Flight Engineer Don Pettit humorously introduces two categories of mass launched from Earth ...

In casual conversation I've been noticing this more and more in my own speaking as well as others. The subject will be missing from the beginning of the sentence and instead it's inferred as the ...

Definition of 'shut' in Collins English Dictionary. Shut is also an adjective, with example sentence "The exit doors were locked shut." I wonder why 'shut' in this sentence is an ADJECTIVE not an ...

I speak English as a second language, and I ran into something this week that I couldn't explain, even though I could understand its meaning. While reading an artcle entitled "More people now ...

To identify human genes and understand their roles allows researchers to discover the cause of various diseases. To contain the meaning of 'by ~ing' or 'while ~ing', can you use 'to infinite' like in ...

I often encounter nouns that I hear of for the first time, and I can not determine which syllable to stress. Unfortunately, I can not find most of these nouns in dictionaries to check the stressed ...

In a question such as "Does this word mean plenty or too much?" where the two words conjugated by "or" are similar in meaning could be asked in a way that a yes or no answer is expected instead of x ...

... the body, authority, entity or person which establishes... Is it correct to use "which" in this case? Or should it rather be "who", since the last element of the list is a person?

Epizeuxis is a rhetorical device which is defined as involving immediate or close repetition of a word or phrase - 'Break, break, break, On thy cold grey stones, O sea!' (Tennyson) or 'There's a fox, ...

Suppose we put in play the rule that lay is used transitively and lies is used intransitively. How do you analyze constructions such as – Where the responsibility (lies/lay) has yet to be ...

Many will know that there are differences in AmE and BrE pronunciation of the words "solder" and "salve". On the topic of "solder", there are already two questions here asking about the correct ...

I am reading the grammar book - A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language - these days. And now I am focusing on the 2 aspects - perfective and progressive - in Chapter 4: The semantics of the ...

Although few facts exists regarding the life of the Native American named Sequoia, the information that is available paints a colorful picture of this man on the plains. Its one of those SAT ...

Is it just me, or? All of the content you see on Stack Exchange—all the questions, answers, edits, reviews, users, badges, tags, and more—is stored in a relational database. Seems technically ...

In engineering/architectural drafting, many people consider grey lines - usually used to indicate existing work or reference work belonging to other disciplines - as "screened back". When older ...

I saw "mediaeval" on a Wikipedia page, and figuring it was a typo, edited it to "medieval", it was reverted as apparently mediaeval is the UK spelling. However, in all the dictionaries I've found from ...

Some people seem to use this phrase. The adjective 'Victorious' seems that it is being used as if it is part of the noun. Would this work in other cases? e.g. "Rome Sacrosanct". Is it technically ...

Do you know any website where I could search a word by a sound from it's IPA transcription ( for instance like ə and get awesome, jonathan etc.). Thank you

It's been many times when it comes to decide whether to use "-or" or "-er" as an agent noun suffix to a verb. My native (mother language) is Greek, and I'll try to provide you a way to think before ...

I've come across a comment in “it seems” vs. “it seems that” and I am uncertain as to what type of word allows raising. It's not necessary (though it's almost always possible) for any complement ...

I relied on the Logic of English (LoE) phonograms to give myself a better understanding of English pronunciation since the spelling gives me a hard time (even as native speaker), but I noticed that ...

For some verbs we can find another (not necessarily unique) verb which has the same meaning except that it corresponds the subject and the object in the opposite direction. For example, if I say “our ...