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While
''While'' is a word in the English language that functions both as a noun and as a subordinating conjunction. Its meaning varies largely based on its intended function, position in the phrase and even the writer or speaker's regional dialect. As a conjunction, it is synonymous with the word ''whilst'', a form often considered archaic in American English, as well as in some style guides on both sides of the Atlantic. Usage Noun ''A while'' and ''awhile'' are often confused due to the fact that ''while'' is often accompanied by the indefinite article. The main difference is that ''a while'' means "an amount of time" or "some duration" whereas ''awhile'' is an adverb meaning "''for'' some amount of time" or "''for'' some duration". :"I slept for a while before dinner." :"I slept awhile before dinner." Both of these sentences yield the same effective meaning. ''Whilst'' is only a conjunction, and so its use here would be incorrect. Conjunction The primary function of the w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American And British English Differences
The English language was introduced to the Americas by British colonisation, beginning in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The language also spread to numerous other parts of the world as a result of British trade and colonisation and the spread of the former British Empire, which, by 1921, included 470–570 million people, about a quarter of the world's population. Written forms of British and American English as found in newspapers and textbooks vary little in their essential features, with only occasional noticeable differences. Over the past 400 years, the forms of the language used in the Americas—especially in the United States—and that used in the United Kingdom have diverged in a few minor ways, leading to the versions now often referred to as American English and British English. Differences between the two include pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary (lexis), spelling, punctuation, idioms, and formatting of dates and numbers. However, the differences in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of English Words With Disputed Usage
Some English words are often used in ways that are contentious among writers on usage and prescriptive commentators. The contentious usages are especially common in spoken English, and academic linguists point out that they are accepted by many listeners. While in some circles the usages below may make the speaker sound uneducated or illiterate, in other circles the more standard or more traditional usage may make the speaker sound stilted or pretentious. For a list of disputes more complicated than the usage of a single word or phrase, see English usage controversies. A * aggravate – Some have argued that this word should not be used in the sense of "to annoy" or "to oppress", but only to mean "to make worse". According to AHDI, the use of "aggravate" as "annoy" occurs in English as far back as the 17th century. In Latin, from which the word was borrowed, both meanings were used. Sixty-eight percent of AHD4's usage panel approves of its use in "It's the endless wait f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Australian English
Australian English (AusE, AusEng, AuE, AuEng, en-AU) is the set of varieties of the English language native to Australia. It is the country's common language and ''de facto'' national language; while Australia has no official language, English is the first language of the majority of the population, and has been entrenched as the ''de facto'' national language since European settlement, being the only language spoken in the home for 72% of Australians. It is also the main language used in compulsory education, as well as federal, state and territorial legislatures and courts. Australian English began to diverge from British and Irish English after the First Fleet established the Colony of New South Wales in 1788. Australian English arose from a dialectal 'melting pot' created by the intermingling of early settlers who were from a variety of dialectal regions of Great Britain and Ireland, though its most significant influences were the dialects of Southeast England. By ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American English
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken language in the United States and in most circumstances is the de facto common language used in government, education and commerce. Since the 20th century, American English has become the most influential form of English worldwide. American English varieties include many patterns of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and particularly spelling that are unified nationwide but distinct from other English dialects around the world. Any North American English, American or Canadian accent (sociolinguistics), accent perceived as lacking noticeably local, ethnic or cultural markedness, markers is popularly called General American, "General" or "Standard" American, a fairly uniform dialect continuum, accent continuum native to certain regions of the U ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots, and then closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is genealogically West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of France (about 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8th and 9th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of Linguistics, linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety (linguistics), variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. Under this definition, the dialects or varieties of a particular language are closely related and, despite their differences, are most often largely Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, especially if close to one another on the dialect continuum. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class or ethnicity. A dialect that is associated with a particular social class can be termed a sociolect, a dialect that is associated with a particular ethnic group can be termed an ethnolect, and a geographical/regional dialect may be termed a regiolectWolfram, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Grammar
English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, Sentence (linguistics), sentences, and whole texts. This article describes a generalized, present-day Standard English – a form of speech and writing used in public discourse, including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news, over a range of Register (sociolinguistics), registers, from formal to informal. Divergences from the grammar described here occur in some historical, social, cultural, and regional List of dialects of the English language, varieties of English, although these are more minor than differences in English phonology, pronunciation and lexicon, vocabulary. Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional grammatical case, case system of Indo-European in favor of analytic language, analytic constructions. The personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adverb
An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering questions such as ''how'', ''in what way'', ''when'', ''where'', ''to what extent''. This is called the adverbial function and may be performed by single words (adverbs) or by multi-word adverbial phrases and adverbial clauses. Adverbs are traditionally regarded as one of the parts of speech. Modern linguists note that the term "adverb" has come to be used as a kind of "catch-all" category, used to classify words with various types of syntactic behavior, not necessarily having much in common except that they do not fit into any of the other available categories (noun, adjective, preposition, etc.) Functions The English word ''adverb'' derives (through French) from Latin ''adverbium'', from ''ad-'' ("to"), ''verbum'' ("word", "verb"), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Conjunction
In grammar, a conjunction (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated or ) is a part of speech that connects words, phrases, or clauses that are called the conjuncts of the conjunctions. That definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech and so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each language. In English, a given word may have several word sense, senses and be either a preposition or a conjunction, depending on the syntax of the sentence. For example, ''after'' is a preposition in "he left after the fight" but is a conjunction in "he left after they fought". In general, a conjunction is an invariable (non-inflection, inflected) grammatical particle that may or may not stand between the items conjoined. The definition of conjunction may also be extended to idiomatic phrases that behave as a unit with the same function, "as well as", "provided that". A simple literary example of a conjunction is "the truth of nature, ''and'' the power of giving inte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Dictionary Of Modern English Usage
''A Dictionary of Modern English Usage'' (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing. Covering topics such as plurals and literary technique, distinctions among like words (homonyms and synonyms), and the use of foreign terms, the dictionary became the standard for other style guides to writing in English. Hence, the 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, edited by Ernest Gowers, which was reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition was re-titled as ''The New Fowler's Modern English Usage'', and revised in 2004, was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield, as a usage dictionary that incorporated corpus linguistics data; and the 2015 fourth edition, revised and re-titled ''Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage'', was edited by Jeremy Butterfield, as a usage dictionary. Informally, readers refer to the style guide and dictionary as ''Fowler's Modern English Usag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indefinite Article
An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" and "a(n)" are articles, which combine with nouns to form noun phrases. Articles typically specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun phrase, but in many languages, they carry additional grammatical information such as gender, number, and case. Articles are part of a broader category called determiners, which also include demonstratives, possessive determiners, and quantifiers. In linguistic interlinear glossing, articles are abbreviated as . Types Definite article A definite article is an article that marks a definite noun phrase. Definite articles such as English ''the'' are used to refer to a particular member of a group. It may be something that the speaker has already mentioned or it may be otherwise something uniquely specified. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books by decree in 1586, it is the second oldest university press after Cambridge University Press. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics known as the Delegates of the Press, who are appointed by the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford. The Delegates of the Press are led by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as OUP's chief executive and as its major representative on other university bodies. Oxford University Press has had a similar governance structure since the 17th century. The press is located on Walton Street, Oxford, opposite Somerville College, in the inner suburb of Jericho. For the last 500 years, OUP has primarily focused on the publication of pedagogical texts and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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