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See List of English words with disputed usage for words that are used in ways that are deprecated by some usage writers but are condoned by some dictionaries. There may be regional variations in grammar , orthography , and word-use , especially between different English-speaking countries.
A aggravate – Some have argued that this word should not be used in the sense of "to annoy" or "to oppress", but only to mean "to make worse". According to AHDI, the use of "aggravate" as "annoy" occurs in English as far back as the 17th century. In Latin, from which the word was borrowed, both meanings were used. Sixty-eight percent of AHD4's usage panel approves of its use in "It's the ...
Neologistic paraphasias, a substitution with a non-English or gibberish word, follow pauses indicating word-finding difficulty. [13] They can affect any part of speech, and the previously mentioned pause can be used to indicate the relative severity of the neologism; less severe neologistic paraphasias can be recognized as a distortion of a real word, and more severe ones cannot.
Many thousands of English examples can be found, grouped according to their earliest deducible Indo-European ancestor. [5] In some cases over a hundred English words can be traced to a single root. Some examples in English include: host and guest: via Latin and Germanic; strange and extraneous: Old French, Latin; word and verb: Germanic, Latin
Expressions or words from a foreign language may be imported for use as euphemism. For example, the French word enceinte was sometimes used instead of the English word pregnant; [22] abattoir for slaughterhouse, although in French the word retains its explicit violent meaning 'a place for beating down', conveniently lost on non-French speakers.
Obfuscation is the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language. The obfuscation might be either unintentional or intentional (although intent usually is connoted), and is accomplished with circumlocution (talking around the subject), the use of jargon (technical language of a profession), and ...
Synonym list in cuneiform on a clay tablet, Neo-Assyrian period [1] A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are ...
For example, "I" may be a pronoun or a Roman numeral; "to" may be a preposition or an infinitive marker; "time" may be a noun or a verb. Also, a single spelling can represent more than one root word. For example, "singer" may be a form of either "sing" or "singe". Different corpora may treat such difference differently.