Oxford University Press has one of the largest language research programs in the world and continuously scours the internet, popular fiction, science journals, and even song lyrics for words creeping into the English language. At one time, 2-3 years of use was required before a new word/term appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, but the internet has cranked the speed of language evolution. Oxford says, “We select those which we judge to be the most significant or important and those which we think are likely to stand the test of time.”
‘Look it up in the dictionary!’ – That’s what my mother always told me when I ran across a word I didn’t understand. Good advice, yes? But this was before the internet, and lugging that hefty volume off the shelf wasn’t nearly as appealing as doing the next best thing—guessing at the meaning according to the context of the sentence. And that seemed good enough.
I’ve been doing the same thing for years when it comes to the spoken word. I adopted words I liked, heard often on television, from friends, on the university campus, and read in books, assuming I knew what they meant.
Homonyms in English are strange little words that sound similar but are spelled differently and have different meanings. These can be tricky, and not just for those learning English as a second language, even those who have spoken the language since birth can confuse them from time to time. Here are some common homonyms and examples of each word’s proper usage.
There are many unbelievable words in the English language–some so strange that they are rarely used. There are words for things most of us did not even know we need a word for. “There’s a word for that?” Some may deepen our vocabulary, but sometimes it is just entertaining to pick through the dictionary for fun.
