A word that starts and ends with angles: v, x. (It is perhaps ironic that this word lacks an A, since it was first of all not just any angle put the apex of a triangle – ah, APEX: there’s the angle to take.) Even in pronunciation you can find an angle: you start at the lips with [v], pass the alvolar ridge at [t] and proceed to [k], but then turn back forward to [s] – in [eks] the tongue closes the angle like a tapping telegraph key. And this word may have a flavour of narrowing in other ways, as other verts may seem narrow because tall (vertical) or simply reminding one of the angle of a v (divert). Others have a more vicious vibe (pervert). And of course there are the ones that turn to the point of dizziness (vertigo), true to the turning origins of vert. But somehow this word does not whirl like vortex, which forces the mouth into a funnel and has the roar of voracious and the lethality of vorpal. Yet vortex comes from vertex, which in Latin meant both the top of the head (and the highest point of anything) and a whirlpool. The o version took the swirl and the e version has taken the whorl on the top of the head. And so we find that the true tellers in the shapes of this word are the t – which has the highest point – and the two e‘s, which are the closest thing to a spiral.
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- 366 Days of Words in Science What this is: 1 photo + 1 word x 366 days. 0 rules.
- Affixes: the building blocks of English Michael Quinion’s site based on his book Ologies and Isms.
- Angry Sub-Editor Patrick Neylan, Eeditor of business reports. Permanently angry about the abuse of English, maths and logic. Terms and conditions: by reading this blog you accept that all opinions expressed herein will henceforth be your opinions.
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- Constellations of Words Explore the etymology and symbolism of the constellations
- Corpus of Contemporary American English 385 million words of contemporary American English texts, searchable for finding frequency, collocations, syntactic roles, etc.
- Dialect Blog The accents of English
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- Google Ngram Viewer Graph relative frequency of words over time in Google’s digitized books.
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- Motivated Grammar Prescriptivism Must Die!
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- Ten minutes past deadline Sub-editing when the clock’s run out but the copy hasn’t. By Ed Latham.
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- wordcount.org A ranking by frequency of 86,800 words of British English.
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- You Don't Say John McIntyre, whom James Wolcott calls “the Dave Brubeck of the art and craft of copy editing,” writes on language, editing, journalism, and other manifestations of human frailty.
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