Author: Mignon Fogarty

How old is the @ symbol? Every source I found seemed to have a different date for the origin of the at symbol, so I’m not going to commit to a certain date. Let’s just say it was a long time ago — at least in the Middle Ages. Many sources, including the Ask Oxford website and a book called “Letter by Letter: An Alphabetical Miscellany,” report that the “at” symbol comes from shorthand for the Latin word “ad” — A.D. — which means “to, toward, or at.” Scribes used to use it to list prices on invoices and accounting…

Anxious “Anxious” means “worried or uneasy,” but it has often been used somewhat interchangeably with the word “eager,” to mean “full of keen desire” — but that flexibility seems to be changing. We got the word “anxious” directly from Latin where it meant essentially the same thing: worried, disturbed, uneasy, and so on. Eager “Eager,” on the other hand, comes directly from French, and an interesting usage quirk is that although French did have the “full of keen desire” meaning, it had many more negative meanings for the word. The Oxford English Dictionary mentions “severe,” “fierce,” “savage,” “pungent,” “strenuous,”…

Trent Armstrong (our former Modern Manners Guy) sent me a picture of a sign that mixed up the words “personal” and “personnel.” That’s one I hadn’t seen before. It read, “Keep Out. Thunderbird Personal Only.” ‘Personal’ versus ‘personnel’: the root “Personal” and “personnel” have the same Latin root — “personalis” 1,2  — which means that knowing the root is no help if you’re trying to remember the different spellings. ‘Personal’ versus ‘personnel’: the definitions “Personal” relates to your person or your body, or implies a sense of closeness. For example, if you are someone’s personal friend, you’re suggesting that the…

When you walk, do you amble? Meander? Shuffle? Trundle? I definitely trundle. I walk almost every day, and when it’s time, my husband always asks, “Are you ready to trundle?” And if he’s being really funny, he’ll say “Get ready to trundle!” in an announcer voice, as if we’re heading out to something as exciting as a wrestling match. 1. Trundle “Trundle” the verb comes from “trundle” the noun, which first appeared in the year 1564 to describe a trundle bed because it referred to small wheels or rollers, and a trundle bed is a bed on rollers that you…

If you want a simple rule, the difference between “less” and “fewer” is straightforward: The traditional advice is that “fewer” is for things you count, and “less” is for things you don’t count. You can count M&Ms, glasses of water, and potatoes — so you eat fewer M&Ms, serve fewer glasses of water, and buy fewer potatoes for the salad. You can’t count candy, water, or potato salad — so you eat less candy, observe that the lake has less water, and make less potato salad for the next potluck. The ‘singular versus plural’ rule As I said, that’s the…

Some of the most difficult questions I get are from non-native English speakers who want to know why we use a particular preposition in a specific phrase. Why do we say, “I’m in bed,” instead of “I’m on bed”? Do people “suffer from” a disease or “suffer with” a disease? Are we “in a restaurant” or “at a restaurant”? I’m a native English speaker, so my first thought is usually something like, “I don’t know why; ‘in bed’ just sounds right,” and sometimes both options are correct. Here’s a question I hear regularly: Hi, Grammar Girl. This is Tom Kennedy…

Since 2006, Mignon Fogarty, also known as Grammar Girl, has delivered trusted tips and fun facts about the English language through her Grammar Girl podcast, newsletter, books, and courses. This is the style guide we have developed internally for our own use, and we thought readers might also find it useful. Many style guides exist, and they serve different purposes for different needs. The Grammar Girl Style Guide below will help you find answers to common grammar and English usage topics that we have needed to decide how to handle. Although these topics are often covered in major style guides,…

Recently, you heard me talk about a “king-size” mattress from Casper, and that reminded me that a listener named Louie had asked me whether he should write about “small and mid-size businesses” or “small and mid-sized businesses.” The short answer is that the better choice is “size,” not “sized”—”king-size” and “mid-size”—although some dictionaries list “king-sized” and “mid-sized” as alternatives. Should you hyphenate ‘king-size’ and ‘mid-size’? As is often the case with hyphens, the answer isn’t as clear—”king-size” usually appears hyphenated, but “mid-size” is routinely seen with and without a hyphen, and some dictionaries show it hyphenated and others don’t. Hyphenate “king-size,”…

The name of the coronavirus disease that emerged in late 2019 is not capitalized because most disease names aren’t unless they are named after a person or a region. For example, influenza, diabetes, and cancer also aren’t capitalized. The other official name for coronavirus disease is COVID-19, which is capitalized because it’s an abbreviation for “COronaVIrus Disease-2019.” Diseases named after regions are capitalized Diseases that are named after regions are capitalized. For example, Ebola is the name of a river in Zaire,* and it was near the Ebola River that the virus first caused disease in humans. Thus, the disease became known…

Lately, it seems as if politicians are constantly calculating whether they should toe the party line, or not. But is that “toe the line” (T-O-E) or “tow the line” (T-O-W)? You can imagine logical reasons for it to be either, but the right choice is “toe the line,” like your toes on your footsies. One of the first examples in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an 1834 book called “Peter Simple” written by the naval officer and novelist Frederick Marryat. The line reads “He desired us to ‘toe a line’, which means to stand in a row.” “Toe the…