Celebrated every March 17 (or sometimes the weekend before, the weekend after, or … actually, throughout the entire month of March), St. Patrick’s Day is the day people around the world celebrate St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. Although the celebrations we see today—which often include parades, pub crawls, and corn beef and cabbage—have little to do with the original feasts that took place …
Articles are a unique type of adjective that, while short, communicate some important information about a noun. An article refers to a noun (a person, place, or thing) and specifies its definiteness. This is a formal way of saying that the article lets everyone know whether the noun is specific or unique to the sentence or not. Not all languages have indefinite and definite articles. English …
Every sentence uses transitive verbs and/or intransitive verbs. But what makes a verb transitive or intransitive? As it turns out, it all depends on how you use the verb. In this article, we will explain what transitive and intransitive verbs are, how they can be used in the passive voice, and provide example sentences that show how we typically use transitive and intransitive verbs. A …
The irregular verb lose is often the source of confusion. People may get stuck when it comes to differentiating lose from loss and lose from loose. However, the problems don’t end there. It can also be easy to confuse the word lost (the past tense of lose) with the word loss, too. In this article, we will break down the difference between lost and loss, …
Seeing a spooky ghost will make you leap right out of your shoes. But which word is correct to use when you tell a scary story about leaping that happened in the past—leaped or leapt? In this article, we’ll jump at the chance to answer all the questions you might have about the differences between leaped and leapt. Both leaped and leapt can be used …
Every year, February 2 marks Groundhog Day. While the frost is still thick on the ground in some places in the country, spring may be on the way. But why is this holiday not called Groundhogs Day or even Groundhog’s Day? Groundhog Day does seem pretty strange … Why is it called Groundhog Day? Well, let’s start with why it’s not called Groundhogs Day, OK? It’s simple really … …
’Tis the season to be jolly! Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la. Great, now we’ll be singing that song for hours. To keep our minds preoccupied, let’s go back a second and look at the word ’tis. What the heck does this word mean, and is it supposed to have an apostrophe in it? What are we even saying when we say ’tis the season anyway? Let’s try to …
In writing, we use three different types of dashes: the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash. This may come as a surprise to many as the hyphen tends to dominate the spotlight. After all, the hyphen is the only dash that makes it onto most keyboards. Considering that the pipe symbol—the what?—makes it onto the keyboard, the other dashes clearly don’t get enough …
A preposition is any word that introduces a prepositional phrase in a sentence. These everyday words and phrases provide the reader with more detailed information by demonstrating the specific location, time, place, relationship, or direction of a given object. Prepositions help connect words and phrases to the next portion of a sentence. And though that sounds relatively straightforward, prepositions can actually be one of the …
Pop quiz! What flavor of ice cream is your favorite? Of all your friends, whose house is the biggest? Which forest animal are you most like? This might have been one of the easiest and silliest quizzes you have ever taken, but it also used adjectives in a unique way: to ask questions. Here is another question for you: do you know what type of …
Conjunctions are words that we use to make connections in sentences. They act as the grammar glue that we can use to stick words, phrases, or sentences together. For example, we can take the phrase the sun set and attach it to the phrase We played basketball using the conjunction until to create a sentence that says We played basketball until the sun set. This …
Who is your best friend? What is your favorite food? Which of the colors of the rainbow is your favorite? One final question: what is a pronoun? If you are a grammar master, you already know that a pronoun is a word that we use to replace a noun. Pronouns show up in a lot of our sentences, including questions. A type of pronoun known …