In 1894, one man embarked on a seemingly impossible quest: to map every language on the Indian subcontinent. Discover the…
The delightful word 'serendipity' wasn't a happy accident itself, but a deliberate creation by 18th-century writer Horace Walpole. Inspired by…
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is the gold standard for writing down sounds, but its origins are surprisingly humble. Discover…
Long before AI could write a poem, the pioneers of computational linguistics took on a monumental task: teaching a room-sized…
Before QWERTY conquered the world, the first typewriter prototype had keys arranged in two simple rows like a piano. This…
Meet Elias Lönnrot, the 19th-century Finnish physician who traveled thousands of kilometers on foot and ski to collect the fading…
The Welsh 'll' is more than just a tricky sound for language learners; it's a voiceless fricative with a deep…
The word 'spinster' didn't always evoke images of a lonely old maid. It originally meant a woman who spun thread…
L. L. Zamenhof may have invented Esperanto, but he didn't bring it to life alone. This is the story of…
What happens when a word that doesn't exist appears in the dictionary? For thirteen years, the non-word 'dord' lived in…
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