The “semantic debate” about Minnesota’s End of Life Options Act is worth having. Semantics deals with the relationship between the definition of words and how different people interpret their meaning.

The film features a conversation between two individuals discussing the hobby of collecting words and their meanings. The dialogue emphasizes the importance of understanding word meanings to improve ...

Almost 150 million people around the world consume cannabis, according to the World Health Organization. With its rising popularity comes new vocabulary for many people. To help navigate, here are ...

Of course, words only have the meanings we give them. Woke, for example, was originally the past tense of wake. Then some people gave it the meaning “aware of and actively attentive to important ...

According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, 54 percent of adults, nearly 130 million people, aged 16 to 74 lack literacy proficiency, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

Wordplay that involves changing one letter in a given word to produce a different legitimate word can be traced to Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece puzzle called the doublet. For example, given the initial ...

When Jacqueline Bircher had questions about the power of words — how they can enlighten, enrage, torment and amuse — she went not just to the dictionary but to the place where dictionaries are made.

Scott F. Kiesling has received funding from the National Science Foundation. A male colleague could be forgiven for not knowing if using “guys” to refer to female co-workers is acceptable in the ...

Ideophones, or words that sound like what they mean—words whose sound evokes the sensory experience they describe, like swish or twinkle—are easier to learn than other words, a new study finds. The ...

A word that is used commonly today in psychology and artificial intelligence is “connective thinking”—a term that bears different meanings according to who uses it and how it is used within a ...

Hetty Roessingh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...