Word Matters

Part three of a three-part interview with John Morse, former president and publisher of Me... more

Part two of a three-part interview with John Morse, former president and publisher of Merr... more

Part one of a three-part interview with John Morse, former president and publisher of Merr... more

It’s our 100thepisode, which seemed like a good occasion to answer a listener question of ... more

A listener questions a tautology in one of our definitions and starts us off on a discussi... more

Writing advice often includes hackneyed phrases we’re supposed to avoid. The phrases we're... more

Whether you're hoping to improve your high school French or just order that croissant with... more

A discussion of various kinds of slips of the tongue and errors of the ear. Hosted by Emil... more

In the disconcerting event that your travels by air deliver you, but not what you've packe... more

Sometimes a word, over time, will take on a meaning that doesn’t play very nicely with its... more

We’ve discussed how words come to be entered in our dictionaries before, but today we’re g... more

Some listeners want to know if working with words professionally makes a dictionary editor... more

The earliest dictionaries were the fruit of one person’s labor, but the 1864 Webster's Una... more

Jacques Bailly has been the official pronouncer for Scripps National Spelling Bee since 20... more

An exploration of Thomas Nashe's use of animals as metaphors for those who imbibe heavily;... more

An exploration of spellings—like 'ect.' for 'etc.'—that reflect alternative pronunciations... more

A visit to the mailbag provides us with a sartorial use of ‘hipster,’ some schooling on 19... more

We all know how to find opposites by removing prefixes: 'unhappy' becomes 'happy'; 'disagr... more

George Orwell published his famous essay "Politics and the English Language" in 1946, and ... more

English borrowed lots of words from French. And it liked some of those words so much it bo... more

If brevity is the soul of wit, are abbreviations the language's best jokes? Hosted by Emil... more

Whistleblowers didn't always tell secrets and hipsters weren't always hip. This episode ex... more

First, we'll look at how 'at large' came to be applied to editors, criminals, and sometime... more

This week's episode is all about the small details that make up the dictionary. How do we ... more

The ending of a word can tell you a lot. Just the slight difference between '-ity' and '-n... more