At first sight this could be a slogan for crunchier fish and chips from the deep freeze, something which food companies could definitely improve on. In fact, it’s a highly sophisticated technique for editing the genes of plants, animals and ...

Words and phrases are quite often borrowed from other languages to express a concept for which there is no existing term – think of schadenfreude or déjà vu in English (from German and French respectively). Less frequently, a completely new ...

The - cide suffix provides us with homicide, the most general word for killing another person, as well as specific types of killing that identify the person killed: fratricide (one’s brother or sister), patricide (one’s father), regicide (the king), suicide ...

The ever-increasing use of technology to monitor our daily activities – from CCTV cameras on every street to social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok acquiring user data for marketing (or more sinister) purposes – has bred in us ...

Following in the footsteps of Movember, one charity’s highly successful renaming of a month in the name of men’s health, come two alternative names for January to promote different, food-based causes: Regenuary and Veganuary. The second of these has been ...

Just what does a proctor do? Essentially his role has always been to manage the affairs of others, as their agent or proxy. But over the centuries the proctor’s responsibilities have varied with the institution he was appointed to. In ...

Browsing through the Cambridge Dictionary’s new words blog, as you do, it’s noticeable how many new compounds are being formed with the word zombie as the first element. Some of these refer to that horror movie staple’s habit of returning ...

Informal words for other people we don’t identify with come and go, but wonk is unusual in having recently resurfaced after several previous appearances in Australia with different meanings each time. It’s recorded from the 1930s as a derogatory word ...

It’s hard to imagine that Covid-19 has had any benefits, but one that is sometimes suggested is the potential healing effect on the natural world of human withdrawal from it. Scientists have given a name to this pandemic-induced slowing of ...

Dai gou pronounced “die go” means “surrogate shopping” in Chinese. It refers to an informal kind of supply chain by which trusted individuals buy and/or transport quantities of selected goods to resell in China or elsewhere, and avoid commercial taxes ...