We invite you to dive in and explore a database of words that appeared prominently in the print history of Scientific American. Below, each year of that historyis represented by a single word, which ...

This line from “Unweaving Science,” the opening track of the spoken word album Experimental Words, illuminates the connections between science and art. The album, an eclectic collection of 10 poems ...

Toddlers can pick up new words just by overhearing conversations. Now, new research suggests that some intelligent dogs can expand their vocabulary in just the same way.

“Language is a huge field, and we are novices in this. We know a lot about how different areas of the brain are involved in linguistic tasks, but the details are not very clear,” says Mohsen Jamali, a ...

A new study suggests the way a language divides up color space can be influenced by contact with other languages. Tsimane' people who learned Spanish as a second language began to classify blue and ...

A new study investigates where toddlers look when they learn new words. It finds that children with larger vocabularies looked quickly towards objects when learning new words. Meanwhile, children who ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. A family pooch probably knows the words “sit” and “stay ...

Unknown cabinetmaker, Italian, “Books and scientific instruments” (c. 1476), wood intarsia. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino (Image via Web Gallery of Art) On Wednesday, Intel announced that it was “dropping ...

One of the best and toughest parts of being a science writer is acting as a kind of jargon liaison. Weird, obscure, aggressively multisyllabic words appear in scientific discourse; I, wielding nothing ...

If you hear the words “once upon a time,” you might guess that you’re hearing the beginning of a child’s fairy tale. And if you hear the words “and they all lived happily ever after,” you know you’ve ...