English is not written phonetically, and one manifestation of this is the presence of silent letters in many words. Mitigating what might otherwise be total chaos, there are patterns or categories in ...

There are legitimate explanations for why words like pterodactyl and tsunami exist. The rogue knight doubted that the asthmatic knave in knickers could climb the castle columns, but when their wrangle ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...