Q&A: Can the indefinite article be used with uncountable nouns?
A user of Macmillan Dictionary made the following comment on the Facebook page: The second sense of the noun respect in MEDO is marked as uncountable, why do the 2 example sentences have an article a...
View ArticleVerbing weirds language – but in a good way
Browsing new entries in Macmillan’s Open Dictionary is a good way to follow patterns in English usage. One motif I keep track of is when words change grammatical class. An adjective may become a verb,...
View ArticleTo boldly go
The newly published Spoken British National Corpus is a fantastic resource for language researchers and anyone interested in how language is changing. The corpus of 11.5 million words of spontaneous...
View ArticleGood, better and best rules for comparatives and superlatives
As children or learners we discover that to express an adjective to a higher degree through inflection, we add the suffix –er (for a comparative) or –est (for a superlative). This is easier to show...
View ArticleDisagreements are plenty
When Samuel Johnson wrote his Dictionary in the 18th century, it broke the mould in several ways. One was its inclusion of literary citations beneath a word’s definition. These are lines by canonical...
View ArticleThis is highly irregular
English is a famously irregular language, its grammar laden with exceptions to the rules. This is largely a result of English being a mosaic of different languages. To its originally Germanic structure...
View ArticlePassive voice is not to be shunned
The passive voice is a common target for complaint and criticism. But there is widespread confusion about when it’s appropriate and what it even is. In English grammar, voice refers to whether a verb...
View ArticleWho’s confused by ‘whose’?
Sometimes two tricky areas of English usage – pronouns and apostrophes – combine to create an extra-tricky pair of words. One example is its and it’s, which cause frequent trouble, and so it is with...
View ArticleYou might should know about double modals
‘You might ought to see the doctor.’ ‘It looks like it might could be.’ ‘You just figured they might could use another wolf or two.’ These lines from literature – by Janice Holt Giles in Shady Grove,...
View ArticlePolicing grammar on the radio
Irish politics in late August was consumed by a controversy known as golfgate, in which scores of politicians and other public figures broke pandemic regulations to attend a golf society dinner in a...
View Article
