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Constantly confused by the difference between adjectives and adverbs? Still can't figure out how to use a semi-colon? Or simply want to refresh the English language knowledge you learnt from...

**Shortlisted, Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2025, Australian history** Bonzer. Arvo. Tucker. Sickie. Pash. Illywhacker. There are plenty of words to choose from to tell the story of Australia from iconic...

Chinese script is one of the oldest forms of writing in existence. Its origins can traced back to at least the second millennium BC and it is still in use...

'This is scholarship at its very best. A brilliant book in every respect' Barry Cunliffe A lifetime's study brings an authoritative perspective to one of the great unknowns in human...

Vocabulary alone isn't enough. To survive in the most sophisticated - and the most scathing - nation on Earth you will need to understand the many peculiarities of the (very...

People can be interested in language, writing and scripts. They may wonder how, when and where did writing evolve? Do alphabets function better than hieroglyphs? And are we today, in...

An expert in forensic linguistics will teach you how to tell if someone is lying to you by analysing the language they're using. How can you tell if someone is...

Language scholars have traditionally agreed that the development of the English language was largely unplanned. John H. Fisher challenges this view, demonstrating that the standardization of writing and pronunciation was,...

A world-leading scholar reveals how knowledge moves, grows, and drives progress We all understand that knowledge shapes the fate of business and the growth of nations, but few of us...

Hieroglyphs, the ingenious picture writing of the ancient Egyptians, are not only a beautiful and fascinating record of a bygone civilization, but also a treasury of puns, double meanings and...

For over a decade THE WELL TEMPERED SENTENCE has provided instruction and pleasure to the wariest student and the most punctilious scholar alike. Now Karen Elizabeth Gordon has revised and...

This criss-cross study, the first of its kind, arranges a shotgun wedding between cliches and coinages - the old (that refuses to die), and new (that often quickly fades). Not...

Irving Lewis Allen provides a history of the rise of New York as a metropolis and the accompanying slang that surrounded it. This book is both a lexicon of slang...

Herbert Clark argues that language use is more than the sum of a speaker speaking and a listener listening. It is the joint action that emerges when speakers and listeners,...

Indefinites and the Type of Sets explores a new theory of indefinite noun phrase interpretation and definiteness effects. The book begins by introducing an adjectival theory of noun phrase interpretation...

This pioneering work introduces and presents the first full publication of the text of an unusual fourteenth-century Bulgarian gospel manuscript known as the Curzon Gospel. Volume I is an annotated...

Few people know that nearly one hundred native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, or that most of Australia's 250 aboriginal languages have vanished. In...

More than anything else, language is what makes us human. Linguistics, the discipline which studies the structure, function, and phenomena of lanuage, has uncovered many surprising and fascinating things about...

How does language work? How do children learn their mother tongue? Why do languages change over time, making Chaucer's English almost incomprehensible? Steven Pinker explains the profound mysteries of language...

Why has language been such a central issue in 20th-century feminist politics? This work serves as both a guide to the major debates and directions in current feminist thinking about...

A brief and humorous 500-year history of the Simplified Spelling Movement from advocates like Ben Franklin, C. S. Lewis, and Mark Twain to texts and Twitter. Why does the G...

Slang is an integral part of the English language and has been so for the best part of 200 years. The most popular belief is that it began as a...

Why don't eleven and twelve end in -teen? The rest of our counting system sits in neatly arithmetical sets of ten, so why do these two rulebreakers seem so at...

Frank Kermode is one of our most distinguished critics of English literature. Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public...

"Introduction to Sanskrit", in two volumes is designed to open the self-teaching guide, presents Sanskrit pronounciation, grammar and vocabulary in simple and systematic steps, allowing students to easily master the...

Coined in the spontaneity of the everyday spoken act, slang exists as a testament to human nature's inventive and subversive instinct. This history of English slang documents our verbal predilections...

Describes the secret of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

A startling new thesis that predicts the end of English as a global language In the twenty-first century, can we really take the dominance of English for granted? In their...

The book titled Dictionary of Modern Phrases by the author Graeme Donald. This is a secondhand book. Please contact us for more information about this title.

Here is the complete history of the word still considered one of the most vulgar and offensive in the English language, from its debut in 15th-century England to the present...

Why does writing exist? What does it mean to those who write? Born from the interplay of natural and cultural history, the seemingly magical act of writing has continually expanded...

An indispensable guide to essential principles of English grammar and usage. Stellar English lays out the fundamentals of effective writing, from word choice and punctuation to parts of speech and...

"Across the darkened basement something creaked, and I tightened my grip on the Colt Diamondback. I'm not usually timid, but my palm was sweaty. That worried me; if I had...

For those who prefer a thesaurus in dictionary form, this bestseller (more than 50,000 hardcover copies sold) is the ideal choice.

Are we tired of hearing that fall is a season, sick of being offered fries and told about the latest movie? Yeah. Have we noticed the sly interpolation of Americanisms...

GRAB A BUMPER, FORGET YOUR FANTEEGS, AND ROAM AT A FOOT-PACE THROUGH THE TWISTY ALLEYWAYS OF THE VICTORIAN VERNACULAR!What larks! Dive into the world of literature's ultimate wordsmith, Charles Dickens,...

This classic book is a straightforward introduction to linguistics which attempts to answer two fundamental questions: 'What is language?' and 'How does language work?' It outlines the scope of linguistics,...

This comprehensive guide to literature in English is a source to the vast heritage of literature in the English language throughout the world. It ranges from Britain and Ireland to...

The letters of the alphabet have been the source of some speculation since their invention almost 4000 years ago. Through research this text examines the many ways in which the...

Born as a Germanic tongue with the arrival in Britain of the Anglo-Saxons in the early medieval period, heavily influenced by Norman French from the 11th century, and finally emerging...

We spend much of our days talking. Yet we know little about the conversational engine that drives our everyday lives. We are pushed and pulled around by language far more...

'Delightful' Steven Pinker 'A joy to read' David Crystal Swamp or bog? Guilt or shame? Poisonous or venomous? We pick from a wealth of words to express ourselves each day,...

Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and - because many have never been recorded - when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin,...

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER! 'ONE OF THE FINEST MYSTERIES I HAVE EVER READ' Rob Rinder, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Trial 'A TANTALISING MYSTERY FOR WORD SLEUTHS AND...

Ideal fathers, cruel fathers, imagined fathers, puffed-up with pride fathers, noble fathers, and humanly flawed fathers, loving fathers, exasperated fathers. Literature is full of these but nobody, until Louise Guiness,...

In an absorbing text, Andrew Robinson explains the interconnection between sound, symbol and script. He discusses each of the major writing systems in turn, from cuneiform and Egyptian and Mayan...