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...
For today’s Word for Wednesday, we’re going to look at one of the English language’s weird and wonderful discrepancies. The word in question: noon. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, noon refers to twelve o’clock in the middle of the day. Noon comes from the Old English ‘non’ which has been used in English since the mid-twelfth century. But the word ‘non’ – and here’s where it gets strange – comes from the Latin ‘nona hora’ meaning ‘ninth hour’ (in reference to the ninth hour after sunrise). Before the twelfth century, the word was used in reference to middle of the afternoon –&...
This week’s Word for Wednesday is a noun most of us will use every day. Unfortunately we can’t see it, hear it or touch it. It is in fact a phenomenon so incredibly abstract that it can easily slip out of our grasp. It seems to have the ability to bend and stretch, to fleet and vanish. Tolkien once wrote a wonderful riddle to which our word is the answer: This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down. Time is constantly around us but nowhere to be seen. It is a system so deeply ingrained in our psyche that it is almost impossible to conceive a state of ...
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