Choosing the best Wordle starting words can be a tricky business. Do you pack it with vowels and go for something like AUDIO or ADIEU? Do you go for common consonants and start with STARE or CRATE?

What strikes me – a lexicologist (word analyst) – is that these picks show not only how aspects of society are changing, but how the nature of words themselves evolves in unexpected ways.

And plenty of words get botched so often that the mistake—like “MISS-chee-vee-uss”—is eventually accepted as a valid variant. So on the latest episode of The List Show, Mental Floss editor ...

Some passages of Scripture get ghosted. Occasionally, you see this happen when you ask someone to read a particular chapter ...

I was nervous – my heart was racing, and I began to sweat. It was 2021, I had just arrived at my first ever parkrun, and I hadn’t even broken into a jog – but my mind was racing.

A varied assortment of words entered (or re-entered) the lexicon this year. How well do you know them? By Miya Lee and Kendall Blomfield Love it or hate it, language is always evolving.

Last year, Keke Palmer went through a lot. In addition to having her hands full raising her almost-two-year-old son Leo, ...

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