Language

Birdlore: ‘De avibus’ (On Birds), from De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things), by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 1240.

The Meaning of Lore

How ‘lore’, a largely neglected medieval word, has found a new lease of life in fandom.

Edmund ‘Ironside’, from the Genealogical Chronicle of the English Kings, late 13th century.

Toad Testicles, Foul-Beard and Broad-Arse

Nicknames can easily raise an eyebrow, but they have value to the historian beyond humour.

Sign of the Times

Speech, rather than hearing, has been at the heart of the long history of deaf exclusion.

A fragment of text inscribed on the Mesha Stele, c.840 BC. Louvre/Wiki Commons.

Inventing the Alphabet by Johanna Drucker review

Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present by Johanna Drucker explores the birth of the alphabet before the Greeks.

scene from The New Art and Mystery of Gossiping, Being a Genuine Account of All the Women’s Clubs in and about the City and Suburbs of London, c.1760.

The 1600s Were a Watershed for Swear Words

Swear words are a constant, but their ability to cause offence is in flux. In the 1600s, today's obscenities were mundane.

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.