A lot of words in English with a silent "gh" originate from a Dutch-like language which had a guttural sound like the "ch" in loch. The Dutch words for light, night, weigh, and enough retain this sound; the English words do not. I speculate (and it is only speculation) that the p...

I was looking for a word that applied to a situation where a person was presented with an immanent choice between troublesome options e.g. new job location with much longer commute; or local position with pay cut. "Hobson's choice" is wrong; it means no choice at all. "Sophie's choice...

Interesting for its variety of uses from soap bubbles, stock market bubbles, living in a bubble, and thought bubbles in comic strips.

Thanks.

I wrestle with the difference between ontology—the study of existence; and teleology—the study of purpose.

This topic was somehow not included in the Goodword discussion area.

From the second verse of the British National Anthem:

O Lord, our God, arise,
Scatter her enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On thee our hopes we fix:
God save the Queen.

I generally associate humiliation with profound embarrassment, but recently I have found the word used without such extreme connotations—particularly in a legal context. In Canadian law, a person can be dismissed without just cause only by providing appropriate notice (which can be substantial) or p...

Both words have an etymology suggestive of pouring or mashing things together to produce a gallimaufry or mélange.

"The candidates speech was a confusion of exaggerations, quotes taken out of context, and outright lies."

Good word, but missing the l in the title.

I like this word. It has such positive connotations for me.

Unix has the cat command, which chains files together. Wikipedia claims that the name is derived from its function to con cat enate files but I wonder if it derives from catenate instead. When two words have similar meanings, often they have some connotation that distinguishes them. Is that the case...

I have heard catenate and concatenate used interchangeably. Is there a difference between them. I first met catenate as an operation that linked separate pieces of text into a single entity such as message = "your search has yielded " & text(count) & " results" In the abo...

This is such a simple word and yet it is causing me problems in the context of a legal document. If someone promises to review something, is there an implication of some diligence? This may be less a semantic question than a legal one.

I would be interested in clarifying the shades of meaning associated with "nugatory", "otiose", and "feckless". To my ear, "feckless" is used to pejoratively describe an actor: "my dog's feckless attempts to catch a squirrel". To me, "nugatory&q...

to call_copse: In North America as well, aggregate is used to mean sand and gravel—particularly in the context of construction. "My son needed four dump-truck loads of aggregate to build up the low spot on his driveway." "Pourable concrete is a mixture of cement, aggregate, and water....