Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. We all know someone who repeats a certain word frequently in conversations. Maybe it's "like," or "essentially" or "literally." ...

What does literally mean? A very long time ago, the word had a single official definition. “Truly” and “actually” come close to this meaning; the original Merriam-Webster definition was “in a literal ...

Few words so rile language purists as the use of the adverb “literally” in a figurative sense, as in, “That movie literally blew my mind.” But as a linguist who studies how English has changed over ...

The Oxford English Dictionary has added the erroneous use of the word ‘literally’, to emphasis a point, to the definition of the word. The dictionary states that the official definition of literally ...

It’s the literal truth, we say, as if that “literal” conveyed an extra measure of authority. Actually, literal meanings are frequently wrong, and often confusing. A recent example is the “naked wife” ...

We're going to take a moment now to talk about a word - yep, one word. Maybe you use it all the time, or maybe you hear people use the word, and it drives you up the wall. I'm talking about the word ...

My editor here in the WGBH Newsroom, Aaron Schachter, is a little bit of a curmudgeon. And in recent weeks he's had a linguistic bee in his bonnet that he will not let go. "I am literally going crazy, ...