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, ...

Modal verbs are words that change the meaning of other verbs. We use them to express if something is certain, likely, possible or impossible. Words like ‘could’, ‘would’, ‘may’, ‘can’, ‘must’, and ...

"Turn off the TV" is an example of a phrasal verb, which is a verb that has a base verb and one or two particles. Credit: MikeSleigh/Getty Images A ‘phrasal verb’ is a verb that has a base verb and ...

Sometimes you know a word has two forms, but you 're not sure which one is appropriate to use in the situation at hand. This happens a lot with verbs, where past-tense forms can compete for acceptance ...

‘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 ...

English is spoken as lingua franca among the people of many countries across the world. It has proved its credential as the ...

There is a misconception that all verbs in a paragraph should be in the same tense. The choice of the appropriate verb tense depends on context and meaning.

Everyone knows that language changes. It's easy to pick out words that have only been recently introduced (bromance, YOLO, derp) or sentence constructions that have gone out of style (“How do you do?” ...