Place names, or toponyms, are said to be one of the stablest aspects of language, with many toponyms carried down through generations and surviving immense transformations in the civilizations that inhabit them. And yet, there are times when a location changes its toponym or has more than one. For example, should we prefer Eswatini or Swaziland; Czech Republic or Czechia? This Language Matters article investigates why toponyms sometimes compete or change over time.

Modern English is the result of a grand linguistic experiment in creative packaging, in that the roots of its grammar are characteristically Germanic, but its vocabulary is dominated by the classical heritage of Greece and Rome. It’s been a long time since English-speaking children learned Greek and Latin in school, but the effects of traditional “Western” classical education are still all around us. Greek and Latin have shaped about half the words English speakers use today, including almost all of our technical and scientific terminology. This Word Stories instalment looks at what can happen when this profusion of Greek and Latin roots gets tangled up in English, for example in the popular temptation to use Latin endings for words that look Latin, like octopus.

At first glance, pluralizing words in English might look trivially easy. All you need to do is add -s: one word, two words. There are plenty of irregular plural forms too, though, like one child, two children and one mouse, two mice. This Language Matters instalment asks why the final -s is the dominant way to mark plural nouns, but not the only one.