Proper language is crucial to the scientific community. It helps answer questions and convey big ideas to the general public. Often, though, specialized scientific words have very specific meanings ...

As ubiquitous as colored pencils and alphabet posters, lists of “sight words” have long been a fixture in kindergarten and 1st grade classrooms. These inventories identify some of the most commonly ...

We all do our best to be accurate, responsible users of the English language, but despite our best intentions, we’ve all had the occasional slip up ("literally" or "ironic", anyone?) It's particularly ...

This is a part of Science Diction, a series digging into the scientific origin stories behind our words and language. Find all our stories and previous issues here. Words like these weren’t just ...

We invite you to dive in and explore a database of words that appeared prominently in the print history of Scientific American. Below, each year of that historyis represented by a single word, which ...