Variations on adjectives, the words that describe things, may well reflect the competitiveness in the world. Or maybe they just add nuance. I haven't decided yet. Some examples of adjectives are free, ...

Superlative close superlativeA word that describes the most of something, for example the biggest, the strongest, the fastest. adjectives are used to compare things and say which one is the biggest, ...

Two recent related questions prompted this post: one on whether "funner" is a word, and one on "stupider" vs. "more stupid." (Thanks, @kellidubya and @joshwood)Apples are crunchier than oranges. These ...

The answer is they were all invented by William Shakespeare in order to add detail to his scripts. When the exact word he wanted wasn’t available, he would quite often combine verbs and nouns to ...

Ned in Albany had a question about the phrase, used in this column, “that works out great.” He asked, “Isn’t ‘great’ an adjective and what’s it modifying here? Shouldn’t it be ‘well’ in uncorrupted ...

Before 2006, I never gave much thought to nominalizations — noun forms like “beauty” and “the scheduling” that at heart are really adjectives like “beautiful” or verbs like “to schedule.” I was ...