One mark of the good dictionary questions is that they often start by quoting a dictionary! (Or two.) [Bad] Is an avocado usually described as a fruit or a vegetable in English? [Good] Famous Dictionary™ defines avocado as “…an oval green fruit with leathery skin…”, but in my country ...

To prevent myself from asking an obvious, silly question again, I would like to know which tools you find most useful, besides dictionaries. I found Corpus Concordance English is extremely useful to lookup collocations. Edit: Please, one tool per answer.

Hi, My colleagues are in the design department of a given product, and when asked to add that information to the e-mail signature, they have written: ProductName's Design I'm objecting that the usage of the Saxon genitive there is incorrect, because the product is neither a person or anima...

I know that to mark possession of an item you can use 's like in the following example: The user's password shall not be blank. However, is it correct to use the following: The car's antenna is embedded in the windshield. I seem to remember that possession must only be used for people but I'm...

Use of the genitive for inanimate objects is not considered a fault. There are occasional suggestions that it's loose usage, but these are usually very old, prescriptive guides that do not reflect modern usage. For example: The car's design is woefully dated. Completely standard in all regi...

If someone owns something I would say: Mom's car. But if the owner is not a person, does it actually own it according to English rules or common usage? Which phrase is right? The house windows. The house's windows. The windows of the house. (Or something like that.) (Feel free t...

How would you explain to a person who is learning English, and whose native language does not have attributive nouns, when the possessive should be used instead of an attributive noun? In particular, how would you explain it referring to the following list of sentences? Today's news is bad Thi...

I saw this announcement on train: The train service terminates at ... I think, in the noun phrase the train service, the word train does not modify the noun service (Edit: as other noun acting as Adj ). I think, tt should be the service of train; therefore, the sentence called for a geneti...

Which way is correct here? Some explanation would be appreciated.

What does the word spouse mean?

I've always been taught that metaphors and similes both draw a parallel between two disparate ideas/thoughts/objects, but that a simile is a more explicit comparison using the word "like" or "is", whereas a metaphor's connection is more implicit. For example, "His injured ankle burned like a hot ...

I'm not sure how to word this question, rather which part to emphasize, but here it goes: What does a simile look 'like'?

For example: Do (English) first names run in cycles, are they always influenced by popularity. Who decides a name will be popular?

Is this a correct sentence? Have we a menu? It sounds a little bit strange to me.

As requested, adding this as an answer: Actually, I would include duplicate words and homonym mistakes (they're/their, its/it's) as typos - they're cases where our fingers can't keep up with our brain, or is that vice versa. Basically, if it's something the original writer would have corrected i...

What is flag weight? As explained in this answer, flag weight is a measure of how reliably you flag content. When your flags are positively reviewed (generally resulting in some sort of action), your flag weight increases by 10 points for flags on posts, and 5 points for flags on comments. Like...

When your flag weight is shown, and below 500, you can see it move if you flag. But once you hit 500 you can't be sure that your flag quality is still good - if you flag half a dozen badly and another 6 well, your weight stays at 500. Is there any way, short of keeping a record of each flag and...