Think twice before you use words like “lackaday” or “nonplussed”—they may mean something quite different than what you’d assume.

Due to its rapid success, the brand name Xerox became interchangeable with the word copy, much like the brand Kleenex has become synonymous ... Asking a colleague to save something on a disk will ...

Sound symbolism is when a word sounds like what it means. One type is onomatopoeia; for example, words that describe a cat’s meow or a rooster’s crow are similar across many languages.