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...
At the end of this month, we will have the closest view of the planet Mars since 2003. When Earth and Mars line up directly with the sun, it is called an opposition and this year this takes place on July 27. From this date until July 30, Mars will appear at its brightest since 2003. The planet will be visible for most of the night, hitting its highest point around midnight. Mars will reach its closest approach to Earth on July 31 and then become fainter by the middle of August. Here are 25 idioms about space: are you from Mars? – a question used to indicate that someone is out of touch with reality/the norm everything under the sun – everything on earth failure to la...
Covering around 72% of our planet's surface, containing 97% of its water, and producing most of the earth's oxygen, yet less than 10% have been explored by humans. This week’s Word for Wednesday is Ocean. Ocean comes from the Greek ‘okeanos’ – meaning 'the great river surrounding the disk of the earth’. Ocean refers to the vast body of salt water that covers most of the earth's surface, and is subdivided into Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Antarctic oceans. The word sea is often used interchangeably with ocean in American English but can imply smaller less significant salt water bodies; although the North Sea was in fact known as...
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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