Researchers at the Allen Institute have hit an artificial-intelligence milestone: a machine that is ready for high school science. Maybe even college.

A close look at a strangely global idiom about how little we understand each other.

No matter how quickly you speak, you still share the same amount of information

An AI program developed by Alibaba has notched up a record-high score on a reading comprehension test.

Spelling contests have remained a feature in American life since the Puritans landed on Plymouth Rock — but is peaking at 12 years old all it’s cracked up to be?

Some languages that have never been deciphered could be the next ones to get the machine translation treatment.

Tablets from some of the world’s oldest civilisations hold rich details about life thousands of years ago, but few people today can read them. New technology is helping to unlock them.

Each year, dictionaries like Merriam-Webster add a few new words to their lexical listings.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

A soon-to-be published study found court reporters in Philadelphia regularly made errors when transcribing sentences spoken in a dialect linguists term African-American English.

Random House’s copy chief confronts three persistent, unnecessary rules about good writing.

A new look at “the Russian Blues” demonstrates the power of words to shape perception

Usually, a minor language will adopt words from a dominant language, but NZ English bucks this trend. It has been borrowing a growing number of Māori words, not always to add meaning but to mark identity.

I recently had the honor of meeting an award-winning literary sort, a man wry and restrained and overall quite utterly mature, who casually referred to having gone through a phase in his 20s when he’d been “pilly”—that is, when he’d taken a lot of recreational drugs. The word had a wonderfully childish sound to it, the tacked-on y creating a new adjective in the style of happy, angry, and silly. My writer-acquaintance, I recognized, was not alone in bending language this way.

I knew I’d never sound like a native. But shouldn’t I be much better than this?

Risking the wrath of purists, the board game’s official arbiters have approved use of the two-letter initialism along with thousands of other new words

Scott Chacon is CEO of the online language learning company Chatterbug.

A University of Bristol academic has succeeded where countless cryptographers, linguistics scholars and computer programs have failed—by cracking the code of the 'world's most mysterious text', the Voynich manuscript.

‘We the Cree people are laughing about it because of what it means in our language,’ says Grand Chief Jonathan Solomon

Can you spell history? The 92nd Scripps National Spelling Bee had an epic ending with eight co-champions.