In English, small but mighty words like "in," "on," "and," and "because" are essential for making our sentences clear and meaningful. Prepositions tell us the relationship between words, often ...

A question from Lucy in Taiwan: Which of the following are correct? 1. What day is your birthday? 2. On what day is your birthday? 3. What day is the Christmas party? 4. On what day is the Christmas ...

NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with John McWhorter, Columbia University linguist and New York Times columnist about the recent Merriam-Webster declaration that English sentences may end with prepositions.

Prepositions are notoriously unstable. That is, the particular term used in a given expression is subject to long-term change in a process I call “preposition creep.” In recent years, for example, ...