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bottle of spirits ("a fifth of bourbon"), traditionally 1/5 of a US gallon, now the metric near-equivalent of 750 mL. to "plead the Fifth (Amendment)", i.e. refuse to testify against oneself in an incriminating manner. filth. (the filth) the police (derogatory slang) dirt, disgusting substance. obscene material.
Linguistic prescription [a] is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language, [1] [2] including rules of spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language , teach what a particular society or sector of a society perceives as a correct or ...
Traditional Spelling Revised. Traditional Spelling Revised (TSR) is a conservative English-language spelling reform which seeks to apply the underlying rules of English orthography more consistently. [1] It was created by Stephen Linstead and chosen by the International English Spelling Congres (IESC) as the preferred alternative to the ...
See also: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Spelling/Words ending with "-ise" or "-ize". This table gives the accepted spellings (following government guidelines and major dictionaries). It is by no means exhaustive, but rather an overview. When two variants appear in the same cell, the one listed first is more widely used.
Spelling rules which maintain pronunciation apply to suffixing adjectives just as they do for similar treatment of regular past tense formation; these cover consonant doubling (as in bigger and biggest, from big) and the change of y to i after consonants (as in happier and happiest, from happy).
Unpaired word. An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. [1] Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym, with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite. If the prefix or suffix is negative, such as 'dis-' or -'less ...
Contronym. A contronym is a word with two opposite meanings. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This feature is also called enantiosemy, [1][2] enantionymy (enantio- means "opposite"), antilogy or autoantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic.
Homonym. In linguistics, homonyms are words which are either homographs —words that have the same spelling (regardless of pronunciation)—or homophones —words that have the same pronunciation (regardless of spelling)—or both. [1] Using this definition, the words row (propel with oars), row (a linear arrangement) and row (an argument) are ...