The Grammar Diva Blog - Bites of Grammar and Such

Compound modifiers are two (or more) words put together to form an adjective:

That is a very well-traveled path.
The three-year-old boy was throwing his toys.
That two-foot-high wedding cake looked delicious.
She is a self-made woman.

With all the new words being added to the Oxford English Dictionary every three months, are there “old” words being removed? Or is the OED growing and growing to an unmanageable size?

Every year thousands of new words are added to various dictionaries. Here are some of this year’s words. (And “hella” was actually added years ago: it is now 15 years old!)

Colons and semicolons look a lot alike, but they are not siblings in the family of punctuation. They are probably not even first cousins.

At the end of the Great Depression, about 25% of American adults made New Year’s resolutions. At the beginning of the 21st century, about 40% did. How many people keep them? And where did the tradition come from?