Language: History & General Works

''It is a book that leaves you musing long after reading... a true celebration of the diversity of language and an important reminder of the quirks...

While birds can chirp and monkeys can chatter, only humans possess the extraordinary power to tell stories and offer explanations, to explain and p...

At last the real stories behind some of Australia's unique and best-loved words are now ready to be told. A companion volume to Bruce Moore's highl...

If many hands make light work, how can too many cooks spoil the broth? If youll find the best advice on your pillow, are proverbs even useful? Ho...

Were all familiar with a flock of sheep but what are the collective nouns for racehorses, pigs, zebras or giraffes? Drawing on a range of sources, ...

From the sublime to the ridiculous, Just My Typo is a hilarious collection of typographical errors, slips of the pen and embarrassing misprints whi...

Born as a Germanic tongue with the arrival in Britain of the Anglo-Saxons in the early medieval period, heavily influenced by Norman French from th...

It is the East, and Juliet is the sun! This is one of Shakespeare's most famous lines and one of the most well-known metaphors in literature. But m...

'Susie Dent is a national treasure' RICHARD OSMAN'Susie Dent is a one-off. She breathes life and fun into words and language' PAM AYRES____________...

''It''s dog eat dog in this rat race.'' ''We''ll burn that bridge when we come to it.'' ''I hope to come first or second, or at least win it.'' T...

What are monuments for? and why are the inscriptions so often in Latin? What on earth is the point of communicating in a language so few understand...

By exploring a rich array of Malay texts from novels and newspapers to poems and plays, Tom G. Hoogervorst's Language Ungoverned examines how the M...

The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries after Romes fall, Latin survives today primarily in classroom...

Ever feel like you are pedalling in the choucroute? Been caught with your beard in the mailbox again? Or maybe you just wish everyone would stop ir...

Are the general and the particular separated in legal rhetorics? What is the function of singular events, facts, names in legal argumentation and w...

Did you know that the Japanese have a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or, that theres a Swedish word that mea...

'What grammarians say should be has perhaps less influence on what shall be than even the more modest of them realize ...' No book had more influ...

A murder of crows, a charm of goldfinches, an ostentation of peacocks: collective nouns for British birds have existed since at least the mid fifte...

Containing thousands of examples of hipster slang drawn from pulp novels, classic noir and exploitation films, blues, country and rock''n''roll lyr...

In this brilliant transatlantic survival guide, Erin Moore examines the key differences between the British and the Americans through their languag...

The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar is a straightforward and accessible A-Z guide to the diverse and often complex terminology of English gram...

A revelatory and exhilarating tour de force, Nicholas Ostler's The Last Lingua Franca: The Rise and Fall of World Languages explores the rise of a ...

Did you know that 'Almost' is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order? Or that 'Stewardesses' is the lo...

Most of us never realise how many words and expressions used in everyday English have a fascinating nautical origin. This charming pocketbook expla...

Ketchup began as a fermented fish sauce from Chinas Fujian province: ke for fermented fish, tchup for sauce. The British were the first to add toma...

The English Language is spoken by more than a billion people throughout the world. But where did English come from? And how has it evolved into the...

This fun, absorbing book, packed with quirky bite-sized lists, quizzes and trivia, is an exploration of the Latin language, aiming to prove that it...