English tips

The silent s in island was not inherited from the word’s original pronunciation. It was added later because scholars mistakenly associated island with the unrelated word isle.

Say and tell both involve communicating words, but they take different sentence patterns. Learning those patterns is more reliable than trying to translate each verb directly.

Modern English uses you for one person and for several people. Earlier English made a distinction: thou was singular, while you developed from a plural form.

The b in debt is silent because it was added to the spelling after the word had already entered English. It shows the word’s ancestry rather than its pronunciation.

“I am bored” and “I am boring” are both correct English, but they are very different confessions. The same contrast helps explain interested and interesting.

English once had the word pease for the small green vegetable. Because the ending sounded like a plural, speakers eventually treated it as peas and created a new singular: pea.

Sensible and sensitive are both useful English adjectives, but they describe quite different qualities. Dutch speakers also have to contend with sensibel, a lookalike that points towards the wrong English word.

OK may be the world’s most widely recognised English expression, yet its likely origin is surprisingly silly. It began amid a nineteenth-century American fashion for jokey abbreviations and deliberately bad spelling.

Bookkeeper contains three consecutive pairs of doubled letters: oo–kk–ee. It looks unusual, but the spelling is completely regular once you see how the word is constructed.

Borrow and lend describe the same transaction from opposite directions. Dutch lenen can cover both, which makes the English distinction particularly easy to mix up.