Archive for the ‘Quizzes’ Category

English has grown by borrowing new words from other languages. It’s rich, dense and deep and many of the words we use everyday have unexpected sources. Novelist Penelope Lively describes English as “a museum inside our heads.” In Moon Tiger, she writes: “Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. . . . We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.”

Try this quiz to see if you can identify the source of some interesting English words.

Try our new quiz, which was inspired by a fun new book about language called Origins of the Specious by Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman. The book debunks lots of commonly held myths about language.

See if you can separate fact from fiction.