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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 ...
Back slang is not restricted to words spoken phonemically backwards. English frequently makes use of diphthongs, which is an issue for back slang since diphthongs cannot be reversed. The resulting fix slightly alters the traditional back slang. An example is trousers and its diphthong, ou, which is replaced with wo in the back slang version ...
Standard: He went past my house on his way to the store. Standard: He passed my house on his way to the store. Non-standard: He past my house on his way to the store. peremptory and preemptive. A peremptory act or statement is absolute; it cannot be denied. A preemptive action is one taken before an adversary can act.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 14 January 2025. This is a list of onomatopoeias, i.e. words that imitate, resemble, or suggest the source of the sound that they describe. For more information, see the linked articles. Human vocal sounds Achoo, Atishoo, the sound of a sneeze Ahem, a sound made to clear the throat or to draw attention ...
"‘Big-back’ is something you say to your friends when they're eating, like, 'Oh, you're such a little big back, you ate four cookies!’” F., a New Jersey 16-year-old, tells Fortune. (The ...
Guttural speech sounds are those with a primary place of articulation near the back of the oral cavity, where it is difficult to distinguish a sound's place of articulation and its phonation. In popular usage it is an imprecise term for sounds produced relatively far back in the vocal tract, such as the German ch or the Arabic ayin , but not ...
Hypsos – great or worthy writing, sometimes called sublime; Longinus's theme in On the Sublime. Hysteron proteron – a rhetorical device in which the first key word of the idea refers to something that happens temporally later than the second key word; the goal is to call attention to the more important idea by placing it first.
Back-formation is either the process of creating a new lexeme (less precisely, a new "word") by removing actual or supposed affixes, or a neologism formed by such a process. Back-formations are shortened words created from longer words, thus back-formations may be viewed as a sub-type of clipping .