In the late 1990s, a friend told me she had used the word “exponentially” in a debate with her brother-in-law. “That’s not a word!” her brother-in-law insisted. “Of course it is,” my friend replied.

Not long ago, a cellphone was a cell phone. A teenager was a teen-ager. Goodbye was good-bye. A website was a Web site. Legroom was leg room. Words and compounds evolve all the time. But in this ...

It's a billboard custom-tailored to grammar buffs. "Every day we help people get back to their everyday," proclaims the ad for Keck Medical Center of USC. In that single sentence, the copy writer does ...

Russ in New Jersey had a question about hyphens: In "northwestern California landmark" should "northwestern California" be hyphenated? "I'm not sure if it's simply a matter of preference or if the ...