Effective communication lies at the heart of human connection. It helps us collaborate with each other, solve problems and ...

Why are some sounds easier to remember than others? A study on made-up words points to the harsh consonants that also dominate profanity.

What’s in a swear? The world’s filthiest words typically refer to something vulgar or taboo, for one. But there’s something else swears across the world’s languages have in common. They’re all missing ...

Have you visited Yew Nork? Does your stummy ache? What dog of bag food will we get? In case you’ve wondered what causes such speech errors or slips of the tongue, you might like to know that all ...

These four sounds are missing from some of the seven words you can never say on television, and the pattern prevails in other languages too, researchers say. By Elizabeth Preston “Holy motherforking ...

This article was originally featured on The Conversation. Cecile McKee has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Her research on language ...

The English language is full of oddities, but some words sound so absurd you’d swear someone made them up after one too many pints. However, they’re real, many with histories stretching back centuries ...

The days of having a dictionary on your bookshelf are numbered. But that’s OK, because everyone already walks around with a dictionary — not the one on your phone, but the one in your head. Just like ...

“Language is a huge field, and we are novices in this. We know a lot about how different areas of the brain are involved in linguistic tasks, but the details are not very clear,” says Mohsen Jamali, a ...