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Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
English spelling consistency was dealt a further blow when William Caxton brought the printing press to London in 1476. Having lived in mainland Europe for the preceding 30 years, his grasp of the English spelling system had become uncertain. The Belgian assistants whom he brought to help him set up his business had an even poorer command of it ...
The word was deliberately coined to be the longest word in English, [6] and has since been used [citation needed] in a close approximation of its originally intended meaning, lending at least some degree of validity to its claim. The Oxford English Dictionary contains pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (30 letters).
English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, and kept their French spellings. The spelling of Middle English is very irregular and inconsistent, with the same word being spelled in different ways, sometimes even in the same sentence. However, these were generally much better guides to the then-pronunciation than modern English ...
The following is a handy reference for editors, listing various common spelling differences between national varieties of English. Please note: If you are not familiar with a spelling, please do some research before changing it – it may be your misunderstanding rather than a mistake, especially in the case of American and British English spelling differences.
Story is the earlier spelling. The Oxford English Dictionary states that this word is "probably the same word as story [in its meaning of "narrative"] though the development of sense is obscure." [175] One of the first uses of the (now British) spelling "storey" was by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852 (Uncle Tom's Cabin xxxii). sulphate, sulfate [176]
The entire first Folio edition is available on A Dictionary of the English Language [45] as an electronic scan. As of April 15, 2021, A Dictionary of the English Language will become Johnsons Dictionary Online, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and created by a team of scholars at the University of Central Florida ...
English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world.The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. [1] The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the fifth century, are called Old English.