Language

The ‘Course Boys’ outside Ivyholme at Dulwich College. Sandy Wilson is fourth from left in the front row; Peter Parker is sixth from left.

Learning Japanese

Official secrecy and institutional rivalry obscured the achievements of two crash programmes hastily launched to teach Japanese during the Second World War.

Things, Many and Varied

How the index helps us to understand, categorise and engage with the world.

Allegory of the Empress Catherine II with the Text of Nakaz, 18th century.

The Power of the Pen

The writing of constitutions is a forgotten artform.

A page from the florilegium containing the minim sentence at bottom right, 13th century, France. MS IV 524 Bl. 3r © Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library/Lower Saxony National Library/Hannover.

Medieval Minims

The hidden meaning of a medieval pen-twister.

A street in Guangzhou/Canton, 1870s © Bridgeman Images.

The Invention of Chinese

Believing language would unify their struggling nation, Chinese officials began a project to create a national language and define what it meant to speak Chinese.

‘Did You Hear the One …’

What to do when a good joke becomes bad taste.

Detail of an illustration from ‘A true relation of the unjust, cruel and barbarous proceedings against the English at Amboyna’, published 1655. © British Library Board/Bridgeman Images.

Making Massacre

A Dutch conspiracy trial in the Indonesian archipelago gave birth to a sadly enduring English word.

The Early Life of Gibberish

What does it mean to speak gobbledygook, mumbo-jumbo or jargon? Such words are more fraught than the playful games of the Jabberwocky suggest.

Here Be Monsters

In Anglo-Saxon England a hill could be a dragon’s lair and a ditch the home of gods.

Pause and Effect

The past and future of punctuation marks.