English is a tricky language. Our “ph” sounds like “f” and our idioms often make zero sense. (The cat’s out of the bag? Who was keeping a cat in the bag?) Similarly, there are many common English ...

The English language is bursting with colorful expressions that come from strange and surprising places. Many of them once had literal meanings that the general public has long since forgotten. This ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. English is a language rich with imagery, meaning and metaphor – and when we want to express ourselves we can draw upon a canon ...

The digitisation of the world’s books reveals how the popularity of English words and phrases has evolved since the 16th century. And the database is now freely browsable online Last year, the Google ...

Modern American English can be really weird — particularly if you know your etymology. There are some words and phrases that are perfectly normal parts of the discourse, but whose history points them ...