MADISON, Wis. – University of Wisconsin students and researchers set out in “word wagons” nearly 50 years ago to record the ways Americans spoke in various parts of the country. Now, they’re doing it ...

Adding a word to the dictionary has long been a sign of mainstream legitimacy. And in the latest batch added to Dictionary.com, the online dictionary has included multiple African American Vernacular ...

"Yass" means "yes" and expresses excitement or agreement; on X, it is celebratory slang. Despite its fame on the internet, ...

It’s a word we often think of when we mean “easy,” but its origins are anything but simple. “Cakewalk” dates back to “prize walks,” or dances performed by enslaved Africans on Southern plantations, in ...

The new lexicon, with Henry Louis Gates Jr. as editor in chief, will collect definitions and histories of words. “The bottom line of the African American people,” Gates said, is “these are people who ...

Editor's Note: This article references racial slurs and offensive language. As the Black Lives Matter movement remains in the spotlight after the police killing of George Floyd — most visibly in the ...

The English language is constantly evolving, with new words and phrases spreading among us like an infection—we hear things, then we say those things. The problem is that we don’t always bother to ...

“The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.” So goes the old chestnut commonly attributed to playwright George Bernard Shaw. One of those separations is in ...