Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The word "thusly" appears with no associated usage notes in M-W; [121] COD11 tags it as "informal", with the entry thus tagged as "literary or formal". CHAMBERS does not list the word at all, and it is unknown in British usage. [122] MAU considers it a nonword and laments that it appears in otherwise respectable writing. [123]
The word grammar often has divergent meanings when used in contexts outside linguistics. It may be used more broadly to include orthographic conventions of written language, such as spelling and punctuation, which are not typically considered part of grammar by linguists; that is, the conventions used for writing a language
The basic form of the verb (be, write, play) is used as the infinitive, although there is also a "to-infinitive" (to be, to write, to play) used in many syntactical constructions. There are also infinitives corresponding to other aspects: (to) have written, (to) be writing, (to) have been writing.
Metonymy and related figures of speech are common in everyday speech and writing. Synecdoche and metalepsis are considered specific types of metonymy. Polysemy, the capacity for a word or phrase to have multiple meanings, sometimes results from relations of metonymy.
Also called the whole-word method, a method to teach reading to children, usually in their first language; has been adapted for second-language reading; words are taught in association with visuals or objects; students must always say the word so the teacher can monitor and correct pronunciation.
English function words may be spelled with fewer than three letters; e.g., 'I', 'an', 'in', while non-function words usually are spelled with three or more (e.g., 'eye', 'Ann', 'inn'). The following is a list of the kind of words considered to be function words with English examples. They are all uninflected in English unless marked otherwise:
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
The words were originally considered foreign—and some people considered that English alternatives were preferable—but today their foreign origin is largely forgotten. Words most likely to retain the accent are those atypical of English morphology and therefore still perceived as slightly foreign.