I recently spoke with Gideon Ben-Ami about Middle English on his LetThemTalkTV YouTube channel. It was a lot of fun! Check out the video: youtu.be/_1hahaLQ_DY?...

Does anyone else find it crazy that you can walk into a bookshop and be charged £9.99 for a paperback novel that took the author a year to complete, but £17.99 for a completely blank notebook?

3 languages under a trenchcoat pretending to be 1. I learned (learning) Spanish as a second language and I am so glad I didn't have to learn English this way. If you are interested in *why* English is the disaster that it is, @englishhistpod.bsky.social

Opossums and the fate of Sir Henry Hudson..? It’s all here in The History of English podcast ❤️

A new episode has posted! 'Episode 182: World of Confusion' looks at why certain reptiles were confused with birds, why pickles were once called 'mangos,' and why the inhabitants of one continent were named after another. historyofenglishpodcast.com

Aaaaand it's here! (he says, realizing that he forgot to actually link to the episode on the website in the first post...) www.lexitecture.com/2025/01/26/e...

A new episode has posted. 'Episode 181: Heaven and Earth" looks at the beginning of the scientific revolution and the King James Bible. (For some reason, Apple Podcasts hasn't updated its feed, so it may not be there yet.) historyofenglishpodcast.com

Etymology of the day: before a tapering piece of hanging ice was called an ‘icicle’ it was an ‘ickle’. In the Middle Ages people decided to add ‘ice’ for extra oomph and (tautologically) called it an ‘ice ickle’, until the two words eventually blended together.

I've posted a new bonus episode at Patreon. "Bonus Episode 105: What's Going On?" looks at several recent developments that are changing the vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation of English. www.patreon.com/c/historyofe...

A new episode has posted! 'Episode 180: English on the Move' looks at Don Quixote, the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, British settlement in northern Ireland, and how settlement patterns shaped Modern English. historyofenglishpodcast.com

I've just established an account here. Look for a new episode this week!