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 ...

Tracing the evolution of English verbs over 1,200 years - from the Old English of "Beowulf" to the modern English of "The Princess Diaries" - researchers have found that the majority of irregular ...

‘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 ...

Common English Grammar Mistakes: English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, yet even fluent speakers often slip up when it comes to grammar. From confusing “its” and “it’s” to ...

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 ...

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?” ...