Nouns are by far the largest category of words in English. They signify all kinds of physical things both living and inanimate. They also signify imagined things like ‘a ghost’; and ideas or concepts, ...

The Anglo Saxons didn’t say ‘the’, they said ‘sê’ – as in pass me ‘sê’ bread. Nowhere in Old English grammar is there actually a precise ancestor for ‘the’. But some time over the 1100s it entered our ...