Words sometimes have two meanings, as Led Zeppelin sang in “Stairway to Heaven.” And indeed they often do. Especially, words can acquire new meanings and lose old ones.

There are lots of English language words that are spelled the same but have different meanings.; A baseball bat and the nocturnal animal bat are good examples of a "homonym." An airy wind and "to ...

The Janus words arise when a new meaning branches off, while the old one survives. ... → Some words have two opposite meanings. Why? From the September 10th 2022 edition.

While many two-year-olds can count up to three, it took them nearly a full additional year to learn which words referred to which numbers. “Number words are unusual because the linguistic cues apply ...

The contradictory meanings of the word cleave (to split or to cling to), for instance, are rooted in two different Old English words. (We’ll get to those details below.) Some contronyms also ...

Scientists say they have made an atlas of where words' meanings are located in the brain. The map shows that words are represented in different regions throughout the brain's outer layer. To make ...

Words sometimes have two meanings, as Led Zeppelin sang in “Stairway to Heaven.” And indeed they often do. Especially, words can acquire new meanings and lose old ones.