Two Spanish psychologists and a German neurologist have recently shown that the brain that activates when a person learns a new noun is different from the part used when a verb is learnt. The ...

As a linguist, I’ve lost count of how many times I have been asked what I think of the various language-learning apps. The truth is that I don’t use them. But of late I have been watching my daughter, ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

‘The’ is the most commonly used word in English. ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ uses all 26 letters of the English alphabet and is called a pangram. Most average adult English speakers ...

My son has the habit of mutating certain nouns into verbs. Confused, I try to take refuge in standard online dictionaries to check whether the nouns are really used as verbs by native speakers of ...

Every few weeks, I get another missive from a reader angry about the common use of certain nouns as verbs. The most frequent irritant is "to impact", which annoys conservatives, but people have also ...

How our scientific perspective of a bay changes when language frames it as a verb—to be a bay—instead of a noun. The following is an excerpt from of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific ...

The conventional grammar wisdom is that turning verbs into nouns — or what is termed “nominalization” in linguistics — is bad for the health of one's prose. The evidence is painfully clear. Take this ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Don’t know about you, but I think we’re having an “overwhelm” of “overwhelm” used as a noun. “Overwhelm” is ...