Emmy J. Favilla is Global Copy Chief and creator of the BuzzFeed Style Guide and author of A World Without “Whom”: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age. If a friend texts me with a ...

If you’ve spent the weekend enjoying a good book in the May sun, you might not have been thinking about mathematics. But if you were reading a book in a Western language, there’s a good chance that ...

Language maven Charles Harrington Elster joins Host Larry Mantle to talk all about mispronounced words, from “arctic” to “zoology.” Elster is the author of The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations: ...

If you hang out with anyone under 30, you might have noticed that punctuation has been getting a bad rap lately, especially when it comes to texting. While putting a period at the end of a sentence ...

The inverted commas, dashes, parentheses and capitalisation happen to be the last few items on our list of punctuation marks. In the above examples it is important to note the positioning of the ...

Ben Duke, of Philadelphia, has sent me a photograph of the front of a store in Brierly Hall, England. The sign reads: Ben calls this signage “The Four Aprostrophe’s of the Apocalypse” and informs me ...

Several writers and inventors in the last century tried to introduce new marks of punctuation into the English language – but they all failed. Keith Houston tells their story. In the 1930s and ’40s, ...

Punctuation is the homely, workaday cousin to the glamorous word. It works quietly in the background, sweeping up and trying to keep the information flow tidy, while words prance around spilling ...

In terms of their actual extent and distribution in the sentence structure, they are the very smallest units: the punctuation marks. But even a tiny comma can completely change the meaning of a ...