American Quote by John W. Dawson

“At first when you're learning a foreign language, what seems strange is that a different set of words exists for the things you know.…

— Stephanie Grant

Words take on many different meanings.

— Erin McKean

“Of all the words that exist in any language only a bare minority are pure, unadulterated, original roots. The majority are "coined" words, forms…

— Mario Pei

The same words come from each mouth differently.

— Jane Hirshfield

English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered.

— Susie Dent

By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.

— Anonymous

English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.

— David Crystal

Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

English is such a deliciously complex and undisciplined language, we can bend, fuse, distort words to all our purposes. We give old words new…

— Willard Gaylin

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

— Salman Rushdie

“Often we have three terms for the same thing--one Anglo-Saxon, one French, and one clearly absorbed from Latin or Greek. The Anglo-Saxon word is…

— Henry Hitchings