Language

Therapists say we're overusing the word. Here's what it actually means — and what the Ingrid Bergman film that helped birth the word can teach us about it.

Generation Z and Generation Alpha are introducing the world to new words, like “rizz," short for charisma, or “looksmaxxing,” which means going to extreme lengths for a glow-up.

It's a word that evokes national pride and rare talent, and one that has been around for thousands of years.

Hat tricks have a rich history in hockey, but it didn't start there. For NPR's Word of the Week, we trace the term's some 150-year-history and why it's particularly special on the hockey rink.

Kid, meaning a young goat, is a word that was borrowed from the Vikings around the 9th century. Centuries later, it came to mean a child and a teasing joke.

"Football" is a word used to refer to different games: American football, the game played at the Super Bowl, where a foot is rarely used to direct the ball. And elsewhere in the world, football refers to what Americans call "soccer." But where does this word really come from?

In this installment of NPR's "Word of the Week" series we trace the origins of the "cravat" (borrowed from the French "cravate") back to the battlefields of 17th century Europe.

It's not just the quintessential corporate jargon word. "Synergy" goes back hundreds of years, with history in Christianity, medicine and psychology.

How an obscure term used in anthropology leaped from the pages of academia into the Chinese meme world and then became part of Chinese government policymaking.

The word "ideology" has become a fixture in American political rhetoric, invoked by leaders to cast opponents' beliefs as dangerous, stupid or unfounded. But it wasn't always this way.