Now where were we? Ah, yes, the Twitter buyout. Soooo with social media not a particularly nice place to be at the moment, we’ve rejigged...

(n.) a fence post The ‘pale’ in beyond the pale is a fence post. In that sense, it derives at length from palus, a Latin word for a...

(n.) trash, worthless refuse material; (v.) to criticize severely; to dismiss as or prove to be nonsense For such a throwaway word (no...

(adj.) entire, complete On the surface, it’s not the most interesting of words, but whole has something of an intriguing story behind it....

(n.) a gesture or movement of the hands used in conversation when a word is forgotten or the speaker loses his train of thought An old...

(n.) the act of removing someone’s head In English, the suffix –al is used to form so-called nouns of action (that is, words essentially...

(n.) an eroded meteorite impact crater Those enormous rocky scars and hollows caused by meteorites crashing into the surface of the Earth...

(n.) the colourful chest plumage of a robin; the robin itself A favourite festive fact from last year’s HH Twitter feed did the rounds...

(suff.) an English suffix typically used to form adjectives from nouns The –some at the end of awesome comes from an Old English suffix,...

(n.) the insertion of a sound into a word, often to ease its pronunciation or as an automatic consequence of its phonological context The...