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Word British English meanings Meanings common to British and American English American English meanings daddy longlegs, daddy-long-legs crane fly: daddy long-legs spider: Opiliones: dead (of a cup, glass, bottle or cigarette) empty, finished with very, extremely ("dead good", "dead heavy", "dead rich") deceased
Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage.
In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal ...
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 synonymous .
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 ...
The irregular spelling of very common words, such as are, have, done, of, would makes it difficult to fix them without introducing a noticeable change to the appearance of English text. English is the only one of the top ten major languages with no associated worldwide regulatory body with the power to promulgate spelling changes. [citation needed]
A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language: 1806 Noah Webster: Basic: A Plea for Phonetic Spelling: 1848 Alexander John Ellis: Extended Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet: 1768 Benjamin Franklin: Extended Booke at Large for the Amendment of English Orthographie: 1580 William Bullokar: Extended Cut Spelling: 1992 Christopher Upward ...
After a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in the valence of its connotations. As an example, when "villain" entered English it meant 'peasant' or 'farmhand', but acquired the connotation 'low-born' or 'scoundrel', and today only the negative use survives. Thus 'villain' has undergone pejoration.