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A word coined in a 2023 blog post became a dictionary's Word of the Year within a year. Tracing 'enshittification' shows how…

The OED's dates carry small signals — a, c, a question mark, a dagger — that most readers skim past. Learning to…

We still 'dial' numbers and 'hang up' calls on phones that do neither. Why some metaphors outlive their objects shows how rarely…

Idioms fade quietly, usually when the object behind them leaves daily life. Surveys and worn-out referents hint at which phrases are going…

Some words do not merely drift; they pivot to the opposite of what they meant. 'Nice' began as an insult and 'awful'…

The Ngram Viewer is a superb tool for tracing how common a word became. It is a poor tool for deciding when…

A "first recorded use" is not a birth certificate. It is the earliest surviving evidence found so far — and the search…

Many of today's most confident word-origin "facts" trace to a single forwarded email from 1999. Here is how a joke became a…

A whole genre of word-origin stories claims old words are secret acronyms. A single date-based rule exposes almost all of them as…

The macabre story ties the phrase to bells rigged above Victorian graves. The dated record ties it to the boxing ring, and…