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There are many words of Latin or Greek origin which end in ‘-us’, however it is not always clear what the plural form is. Do words like ‘hippopotamus’ and ‘octopus’ end in -es or -i? The website About.com explains that it is best to go with hippopotamuses http://homeworktips.about.com/od/plurals/f/hippopotamus.htm, whereas with the word octopus you apparently cannot go wrong if you guess the plural as octopuses, octopodes or octopi … Continue reading
According to Richard C Lamb in his book The Queen’s English, “heterophones are words with different meanings which are spelt the same (homographs), but pronounced differently” e.g. row, rhyming with ‘go’ as in ‘I row my boat at weekends’ and row, rhyming with ‘cow’ as in ‘They had a row, and he walked out’. Here are some examples: Read … Continue reading
Yesterday I blogged about homographs which are “words with the same spelling but different meanings” and they can sometimes sound different (according to Bernard C Lamb in his book The Queen’s English) e.g. ‘row’ which can rhyme with ‘go’ and also ‘cow’. Homophones are words which have the same sound but different meanings, e.g. led/lead, so/sew, read/red and row/row (as … Continue reading
“Homographs are words with the same spelling but different meanings” and they can sometimes sound different too (according to Bernard C Lamb in his book The Queen’s English). ‘Homo’ means the same and ‘graph’ means picture or drawing – to remember this, imagine the same picture or drawing. Examples: think about the word ‘row’ – it can rhyme … Continue reading
I’ve seen the abbreviation SEO quite a lot recently. It’s short for Search Engine Optimisation and there are many companies out there whose job is to help others attract more visitors to their websites, webpages, blogs etc., although there are ways that you can do this yourself by learning how to use the right key words. Having … Continue reading
According to Graham King in his book Collins Improve your Punctuation, it is clearer to write dimensions and measurements in figures as follows: The tablecloth is 15 by 25cm 4 metres of material is required The Christmas trees range from 4ft 6in to 7ft 5in tall 4oz butter, 4oz caster sugar, 4oz self-raising flour and … Continue reading
Realising that I was unable to define indefinite pronouns without looking it up, I decided to cover this subject in today’s blog. Pronouns are “a class of words that ‘stand in’ for other words” according to John Seely’s book the Oxford A-Z of Grammar & Punctuation, whereas he defines indefinite pronouns as those which are less precise. Looking up the word … Continue reading
There are a lot of conflicting articles around on this subject. The Cambridge Dictionaries online defines anyone as “used in questions and negatives to mean ‘a person or people’” http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/anyone?q=anyone and the Oxford Dictionaries online has a very similar definition. Interestingly, if you look up anybody in both online dictionaries, it says anyone. The Dr Grammar site: http://www.drgrammar.org/search/node/anybody also suggests … Continue reading
Several websites and forums researched today suggest that the words among and amongst can be used interchangeably. According to question 117 on Dr Grammar’s frequently asked questions: http://www.drgrammar.org/frequently-asked-questions#117 “both are correct and mean the same, but among is more common”. According to a few other websites, among is used in American English and is also the ‘modern’ way in British English, … Continue reading
For my regular readers, you will know that I have been blogging in My Writing Notebook as part of My Writing Challenge since 1st May 2011. I have now discovered from another fellow blogger that there is a ‘post a day 2011’ challenge which I really want to be part of. I am therefore promising to … Continue reading
My Writing Notebook 