English words of German origin
English is a Germanic language, which means it is in the same family as German. Because of this many words are very similar or the same in both languages. This article is not about those, it is about words that came to modern English from modern German. We also have other posts about words from […]
American and British spelling differences (part 2)
Last time we wrote about our/or, ise/ize and yse/ize. This time we are continuing with spelling differences between American and British English. RE vs ER: theatre and theater This is probably the best known difference between American and British spellings. Most words that end in an unstressed -er in British English are spelt with -re […]
English words of Italian origin
We’ve gone over English word of Portuguese, Spanish, Polish and French origin. It is now the turn of Italian! Italian is a language that has given English many words but in different ways as the other languages we wrote about before. Spanish and Portuguese gave us words related to the ‘new world’ of America, Polish […]
English words of French origin
French was the language used by the ruling classes in the UK for over 300 years, almost half of the words in modern English come in one way or another from French. We could write a book about all the words of French origin in English, but we’re just going to write about some of […]