If you’re one of our regular readers you’ll be familiar with articles about idioms, but every now and then we like to share a recap for our new subscribers. Here are Spellzone we believe that one of the reasons English is such a difficult language to learn is because it’s full of idioms. Every few weeks we take a list of popular idioms and translate them for our second-language English speakers. An idiom is an expression which has a figurative meaning rather than a literal one. For example, when someone says ‘needle in a haystack’ they probably aren’t actually talking about a needle and a haystack, but about something that is as difficult to fi...
What does each word mean? An heir is a person who is entitled by law or by the terms of a will to inherit the estate, title, or office of another. The word is pronounced with a silent ‘h’ like ‘air’. Click here for the full Spellzone dictionary definition of the word. Here is heir used in an example sentence: Prince Charles is the heir apparent to the British throne. In the Harry Potter series, Tom Riddle is Slytherin’s heir. Click here to find the Spellzone vocabulary lists related to the word heir. The word air can refer to a mixture of gases (especially oxygen) required for breathing, the region of free space above the ground, or a d...
Having woken up to a bout of spectacularly apocalyptic weather this morning which has continued for the whole of the day, I felt moved to explore the etymologies of what are widely known as the four ‘Classical Elements’: terra, aqua, aer and ignis (earth, water, air and fire). ‘Earth’ comes from the Old English 'eorþe' meaning dry land, and by the time this word was widely used around 1000 years ago it had already began to refer to the earth in the wider, terrestrial sense. The word ‘Water’ as we know it comes from the proto-Germanic 'watar', meaning just that. Etymology Online suggests that Proto Indo European (PIE) had two stems for the word water. The most interesting of those can st...
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