" The main significant effect found in this study was that people who'd lived at least three months outside the US rated the English accent significantly lower than people who'd only lived in the US. In fact, Americans who had not lived abroad considered the English-accented person to be much more intelligent than themselves, but the people who had lived abroad rated the standard American accent more intelligent than the standard English one. My preferred way of interpreting this (a bit tongue-in-cheek) is that Americans are happy to rate the English as more intelligent than themselves up until they actually start meeting and talking to the English."

nice collection of writing tips

"If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine: The Times has great data on the words that send readers in search of a dictionary."

"Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, Wikipedia articles and knols. Use previous human translations and machine translation to 'pretranslate' your uploaded documents. Use our simple WYSIWYG editor to improve the pretranslation. Invite others (by email) to edit or view your translations. Edit documents online with whomever you choose. Download documents to your desktop in their native formats --- Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML. Publish your Wikipedia and knol translations back to Wikipedia or Knol."

"GOD TEXTS THE TEN COMMANDMENTS." 1. no1 b4 me. srsly. 2. dnt wrshp pix/idols 3. no omg's 4. no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r) 5. pos ok - ur m&d r cool 6. dnt kill ppl 7. :-X only w/ m8 8. dnt steal 9. dnt lie re: bf 10. dnt ogle ur bf's m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob. M, pls rite on tabs & giv 2 ppl. ttyl, JHWH. ps. wwjd?

ESL resources (for adults) from the US Dept of Ed. "an outgrowth of a project that was conceived by the U.S. Department of Education (ED), Office of Vocational and Adult Education, Division of Adult Education and Literacy (DAEL). Core funding for U.S.A. Learns was provided by ED. Additional funding for U.S.A. Learns was made available by the California Department of Education, Office of Adult Education. DAEL promotes programs that help American adults get the basic skills they need to be productive workers, family members, and citizens. The major areas of support are Adult Basic Education, Adult Secondary Education, and English Language Acquisition. These programs emphasize basic skills such as reading, writing, math, English language competency and problem-solving. "

useful for finding the word hovering outside your reach

Covering several popular foreign language social networks. (Naver, Baidu, Mixi, Mediapart.fr)

find speakers of other languages who want to practice yours

resource for writing poetry

based on the style book which is given to all journalists at The Economist.

Everyone has a favorite word. What's yours? (sparked my deluge of word postings to del.icio.us today, sorry!)

What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages?

like mango, a social language acquisition portal

a collection of words that are troublesome to readers and writers. Words are grouped according to the way they are most often confused or misused.

An idiom is a phrase where the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words, which can make idioms hard for ESL students and learners to understand.

When you're up to your neck in alligators, it's easy to forget that the initial objective was to drain the swamp

Em, en, and when to use them

an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect. Characteristic of the eggcorn is that the new phrase makes sense on some level ("old-timer's disease" for "Alzhei

Two-word numbers should be expressed in figures.

Excellent resource for grammar rules and lessons

English and, I assume, other languages, are full of rules that no one teaches - not to native speakers anyway - but that everyone learns.

for recording Skype audio conversations.

Some common solecisms

A word is autological or homological if it truly describes itself

lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word.

Strait-laced, just deserts, shoo-in, fount of knowledge, free rein, sleight of hand, fazed by, buck naked, vocal cords

Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling.

The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed.

This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.

We have built a database of some of the questions sent in to the Oxford Word and Language Service team, so it is likely that if your question is a fairly broad one on grammar, usage, or words then it will be answered here. Simply choose a category and the

Samuel Johnson

This handout details seven easy steps to becoming a comma super hero.

The winning entries in our 16th annual mini short story contest