Over 1.5 billion people speak English worldwide — without knowing how the words are flowing out of our mouths. To those born to English-speaking families and countries, speaking English comes ...

All words had to start somewhere. Through the careful work of historical linguists and lexicographers, we can usually trace a word, if not to its ultimate origin, at least pretty far back in time. We ...

How many words are there in English? It depends on how you count them — do run and running count as separate words? What about run [a footrace] and run [for office]? A good conservative estimate is ...

What are the 100 most common words in the English language? A note to our players: On December 31, 2022, Smithsonianmag.com will cease hosting this game on our site. We apologize for the inconvenience ...