Our picturesque country of Costa Rica boasts a diversity of natural wonders, from lush rainforests to stunning beaches. This gives rise to the question – why do foreigners seem to take liberties with ...

As reported by Robert Quigley over at Geekosystem, a pretty substantial change was reported as coming to a classic language-driven board game: the legalization of proper nouns in Scrabble. Robert was ...

Oh, look! There’s some thing sleeping in the trees! Common nouns are the names of things, that’s people, places or objects, while a proper noun is the name of a particular person, place or thing.

Apostrophes are equal opportunity humiliators. As I wrote recently, apostrophes incriminate less-word-savvy types by popping up in plurals like “We play bridge with the Smith’s” and “He had two ...

Syntax has been noted to play an important role in word learning in English; it distinguishes the fundamental conceptual difference between individuals (coded as proper nouns), nonindividuals (coded ...

For decades family arguments have raged furiously over whether words like Quzhou (a city in southern China, 27 points) and Zuma (as in the South African president, 15 points) are eligible. At least to ...

A guest post from Slate contributor Stefan Fatsis: No, world, the rules of Scrabble are not changing. Despite what you may have heard this morning on NPR or read on Kotaku or CBS or learned from the ...

I woke yesterday morning to an e-mail from an editor at a London newspaper asking whether, as the author of a book about the world of competitive Scrabble, I had any thoughts on the news that "the ...