Reading: Reference Resources

This authoritative survey of English usage, grammar, and style offers guidance on almost any writing problem imaginable. Arranged in a single, easy-to-use A-Z list, the guide's entries include examples and quotations that show not only correct and incorrect usage but also the relative effectiveness of different expressions in context.

Completely revised and updated in its fifth edition, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, with definitions of words from A to zoösemiotics, is the standard single-volume reference for its field.

Puzzled by signs warning you to mind the gap in the London Underground? Wondering what will be on your plate if you order toad in the hole off the menu of a London café? Unable to suss out what people in the UK mean to say? Then mug up on your British English with Divided By A Common Language: A Guide to British and American English.

Modern communications are breaking down distinctions between formal and informal English, raising ever more questions as to how to speak and write correctly.

The purpose of this book is to uncover the often surprising connections between elements of the English lexicon that have become obscured by centuries of language change - the links in our word-web that join such unlikely partners as, for instance, beef and cow, bacteria and imbecile, and bishop and spy.