Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
[2] Perceived violations of correct English usage elicit visceral reactions in many people. For example, respondents to a 1986 BBC poll were asked to submit "the three points of grammatical usage they most disliked". Participants stated that their noted points "'made their blood boil', 'gave a pain to their ear', 'made them shudder', and ...
See List of English words with disputed usage for words that are used in ways that are deprecated by some usage writers but are condoned by some dictionaries. There may be regional variations in grammar, orthography, and word-use, especially between different English-speaking countries.
A aggravate – Some have argued that this word should not be used in the sense of "to annoy" or "to oppress", but only to mean "to make worse". According to AHDI, the use of "aggravate" as "annoy" occurs in English as far back as the 17th century. In Latin, from which the word was borrowed, both meanings were used. Sixty-eight percent of AHD4's usage panel approves of its use in "It's the ...
third edition: Includes over 47,000 headwords and phrases with 4000 specialist terms, 3500 idioms and phrasal verbs, over 34,000 examples, 650 usage examples, over 200 illustrations covering over 2000 terms, 64 study pages. CD-ROM includes English pronunciations.
The use of "an" before words beginning with an unstressed "h" is less common generally in AmE. [35] Such usage would now be seen as affected or incorrect in AmE, [36] which normally uses a in all these cases. According to The New Oxford Dictionary of English, such use is also increasingly rare the UK. [34]
These are 1100 of the most common words in American English in order of usage. This can be a particularly useful list when starting to learn a new language and will help prioritise creating sentences using the words in other languages to ensure that you develop your core quickly.
Some lists of common words distinguish between word forms, while others rank all forms of a word as a single lexeme (the form of the word as it would appear in a dictionary). For example, the lexeme be (as in to be ) comprises all its conjugations ( is , was , am , are , were , etc.), and contractions of those conjugations. [ 5 ]
Usage Example Found in Absolutive case (1) patient, experiencer; subject of an intransitive verb and direct object of a transitive verb: he pushed the door and it opened Basque | Tibetan: Absolutive case (2) patient, involuntary experiencer: he pushed the door and it opened; he slipped active-stative languages: Absolutive case (3) patient ...