I knew none of the American ones. That's slang for you. Thanks to Xeb

Oxford University Press are publishing the world's largest thesaurus. It's taken them 40 years to compile the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is published in two volumes, and is 4,500 pages long. It contains 800,000 meanings split into 236,000 categories and sub-categories. But don't worry, you don't have to memorise them all.

Making an entrance Originally uploaded by waɪ.tiː If you "make an entrance" it means you enter a place in some formal or special, eye catching, way. For example:- British comedian, Baron Cohen, made a real entrance posing as a gay Austrian fashionista and landing on Eminem's face at the MTV Movie Awards. Of course this […]

The writing's on the wall Originally uploaded by waɪ.tiː If the writing is on the wall for a person or an organization, it is clear that they will fail or be unable to continue. However this photo shows our hotel room in Strasbourg where the writing was literally on the wall, which is a bit […]

US web monitoring firm, Global Language Monitor, has declared the millionth Englith word to be "Web 2", which is a term used for the latest generation of web products. (They trawl the internet for new words and terms and once a word or phrase has been used at least 25,000 times, it accepts it. Seemingly […]

Singapore has launched campaigns to promote better English. But more importantly, they have another campaign running too, to promote kindness. The city-state wants its citizens to be... nicer. "Kindness. Bring It On!" -- to be launched this weekend -- is a government-backed initiative aimed at encouraging Singaporeans to be openly gracious to their relatives, colleagues, […]