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kick-ass: to beat up or beat, e.g. "I am going to kick his ass" or, more positively, something that beat (did better than) everything else, e.g. "The opening band was kick-ass." (vulgar) someone acting inappropriately or offensively ("That guy was an ass!") athletics
When the prefix "re-" is added to a monosyllabic word, the word gains currency both as a noun and as a verb. Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing". There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or ...
A homograph (from the Greek: ὁμός, homós 'same' and γράφω, gráphō 'write') is a word that shares the same written form as another word but has a different meaning. [1] However, some dictionaries insist that the words must also be pronounced differently, [ 2 ] while the Oxford English Dictionary says that the words should also be of ...
If the latter meaning is intended, the word (though singular in form) may be treated as if it were a plural, in that it may take a plural verb and be replaced with a plural pronoun: (in British English) the government are considering their position (alternatively the government is considering its position).
Some usages identified as American English are common in British English; e.g., disk for disc. A few listed words are more different words than different spellings: "aeroplane/airplane", "mum/mom". See also: American and British English differences, Wikipedia:List of common misspellings and Wikipedia:Manual of Style#National varieties of English
A homophone (/ ˈ h ɒ m ə f oʊ n, ˈ h oʊ m ə-/) is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning or in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example rose (flower) and rose (past tense of "rise"), or spelled differently, as in rain, reign, and rein.
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and emphasis.. Most national and international languages have an established writing system that has undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language.
The following is a handy reference for editors, listing various common spelling differences between national varieties of English. Please note: If you are not familiar with a spelling, please do some research before changing it – it may be your misunderstanding rather than a mistake, especially in the case of American and British English spelling differences.