Tag: language

Today we’re going to take on a somewhat tricky one; I actually saw this in print in a restaurant menu, which is what inspired the post; the menu talked about a particular item that it promised would “please your palette.” And so here we are. These words routinely get mixed up more often than not. And we’ll throw in a fourth word that’s similar in sound but has nothing to do with any of the others except that occasionally somebody will substitute one of them for it. Pallet, palette, palate, pallid.

This time out, we get a Gang of Four; four different words that all sound exactly the same, though they are spelled four different ways, come from four different sources and mean (more than) four different things: right, rite, wright and write.

Hello, and welcome to another exciting installment of Word Nerd, where we attempt to untangle the convoluted vocabulary of the English language.

Today we have another threefer, though only two of them get routinely abused. Poor, pore, and pour.

Welcome to yet another bout of Word Nerd, the weekly feature where we examine, explain and illustrate confusing words. Let’s get to it, shall we? This week we have a threefer. Peek, Peak, and pique.

Rain, rein, reign; all three of these terms come to us by way of Middle English, but their sources vary. The oldest of the three, from the 12th century, is rain, which comes from the Old German regan, meaning rain. About a hundred years later, reign pops up, from the Latin regnum, meaning king. Another hundred years or so, and rein starts to show up, again from the Latin (retinere; to restrain), though it passes through Anglo-French (resne) first.

Hi, and welcome to a new recurring feature here at GeekDad. I’m Jim MacQuarrie, geekdad, writer, cartoonist, designer, archery instructor, and internet curmudgeon. Like a lot of geeks, I’m cranky about bad grammar and punctuation, but my real bugaboo is when people use the wrong word.