Being an Australian I am accustomed to -t past tenses like learnt and spelt, so naturally I would write and say "earnt". However, when I wrote "earnt" in an email, Outlook underlined it as a misspelt word.  I did some further research and discovered that in all English dialects "earned" is used instead of "earnt". Why is this the case, and for how long has it been?  As mentioned in a similar question on this site, Wiktionary is the only online dictionary with an entry for "earnt".  NOTE: I checked for this same question on this site, but it only had what I already knew (the validity of the word). I would like to know why "earnt" is not a word.
123736
Is the past tense for the word "earn" "earned" or "earnt", and does the word "earnt" even exist?
99244
I want to know whether there is a hyphen in the word re-offend, or if it is spelt reoffend. I looked in Oxford English dictionary and the word "reoffend" appears, but then I checked Merriam-Webster and the word is not in there.  So is reoffend a word or is it re-offend?  I'm in Australia where we observe UK English if that matters.
17570
What is the correct form? Does context play a role?  Are there noticeable trends towards the awkward "noone" or is it just a by-product of careless orthography on the Internet?
36050
I just wrote  in an ELL chat room. But looking at it (or more accurately, listening to my "inner voice" trying to "read it aloud"), I find it bothers me a lot.  A quick check on Google Books finds a claimed 432 written instances of , and 910 instances of , which suggests a significant minority of writers don't have a problem with the fact that the two different read's don't sound the same.  When I check the same construction with other verbs that don't have the same written form for past participle and present tense, it seems people nearly always include both (e.g. :1230, :8; :357, :7).  I'm not usually a big fan of "grammatical rules", but it seems to me there "ought" to be a rule that you shouldn't delete one instance of the verb unless it's "the same" as the one you're keeping. And it also seems to me that since language is primarily spoken, "the same" ought to mean "sounds the same when spoken", not "looks the same when written".  Can anyone who knows more than me about formal rules of grammar settle this one?    As an aside, offhand I can't think of any verb where the past participle and present tense sound the same but are written differently (maybe there aren't any), but would deletion be okay in that case?
62531
In a recent Financial Times article (Yemen PM Escapes Assissnation), the apostrophe necessary to show possession was left out. I've seen colleagues do it as well. Isn't it supposed to be "Yemen's PM Escapes...?" Other times I've seen people write "Japan Minister of Finance tackles deflation..." or "India VP resigns..." I have noticed that in most of these cases, the omission of the apostrophe was right before a captilazed appellation (president, country, municipal, etc.) What's going on? Firm grammar rules stipulate that there be an apostrophe, yet there isn't one. If the FT does it, then there must be an exception (in journalism?) that I'm unaware of. Must there or must there not be an apostrophe?
123554
I'm trying to find out how come we say lucky me and stupid us rather than lucky I and stupid we. My understanding is that this is not a recent invention, but a relic from the distant past where it was a dative construction. However, I don't see the reason for using any case other than the nominative in this construction to begin with.        He went surfing. → Lucky him went surfing.   I got pulled over. → Stupid me got pulled over.   They bought a house. → Thoughtless them bought a house.      This is rather intriguing. After thinking about it for a while, I couldn't come up with any other language, Germanic or otherwise, where simply introducing an adjective would dictate a change of grammatical case. This appears to be an English peculiarity. How far can it be traced back? Can anyone comment on its background?
20055
I was reading about various terms for incorrect words, but they didn't seem to fit.  I saw a post where someone said "what do you like to do when you're board?".  That kind of thing.  Also, would that be considered a mistake in grammar?  I didn't think so, but my friend insists it is.  I'm not sure if there even is a word for that kind of mistake, but was just curious about it.  Thanks!
87324
It just occured to me that there are words in English that have two different meanings, two different pronunciations and are written exactly the same.  For example "present" can be interpreted as the tense when pronounced   /ˈprezənt/ or as a synonym of "demonstrate" when /priˈzent/  Other examples from the top of my head: "read", "live".  I don't think I have seen that in any other language. In most languages you can't tell the spelling of a word by hearing it, but you call articulate it correcly when you're reading it. It seems that in English you can't do either of those.  Did English ever have accent marks to distinguish between those? How did it end up like that?
57792
May I ask what the logic is behind using present perfect/infinitive + present perfect in "present perfect + since + present perfect" sentences?     it has been a while since I have enjoyed a party this much.   and     It's been a long time since I have read an interesting book.   Why is it not present perfect + past simple? I understand the "it's been" part, since it's something that is still relevant or going on. But if I'm referring to a specific past event, why should present perfect even be considered?  2) Also, I've seen people replace infinitive forms with present perfects:  "You must be surprised to receive a letter from me" = "You must be surprised to have received a letter from me"  Is there such thing as an infinitive present perfect? How is this construction possible?   Please help me understand!
119094
I've always been curious why some people insist that "I was mistaken" is grammatically correct whereas "I was mistaking" is grammatically wrong.  Doesn't the later follow past progressive verb tense?  Can someone give me an example where each is right or wrong?
6839
I know that words like login and payoff are properly nouns but I increasingly notice many (not at all uneducated) people use them as verbs:     Will you payoff your credit card this month?   and     Please check this when you login.   To me (a non-native English user), that seems incorrect because separating the core noun from a preposition is what I was taught: Please check this when you log in. (My emphasis)  Is this use proper or not?
65434
I mostly have exposure to American English online. I am currently writing out a resume and need some help.   In Australia, in general, we write programme to mean a schedule or community programme. However with computer studies I'm inclined to write program to mean a computer program rather than the proverbial programme.  What is the correct spelling?
35487
Given that English is derived mostly from German, when Anglo-Saxons (German tribes) migrated to Britain, how do you explain that   although German has a strict correspondence between written language and spoken language (the sounds largely follow 1-1 what is written)... English has sooo intricate pronunciation rules, sometimes directly at odds with what is written? (Too bored to give examples, but it should be obvious).   My pet, tongue-in-cheek theory is that those tribes weren't too literate, didn't have a sound knowledge of the written form of words, so it was easy the pronunciation to follow its own independent path.   Anyone with a more informed explanation?
29903
Why have a letter in a word when it’s silent in pronunciation, like the b in debt?  Can anyone please clarify my uncertainty here?
12016
OK, so I’m ashamed to admit that as a native speaker I think I’ve missed something somewhere. I was typing up some documentation and spellchecker kept bugging me.  So I looked up some words and found this:     The suffixes ‑ance and ‑ence mean   “quality of” or “state of.” Words   ending in these suffixes are usually   nouns. There is no rule that governs   whether a word ends with    ‑ance or ‑ence.   Even the dictionary on my Mac goes so far as to say:     ORIGIN from French ‑ence, from Latin   ‑entia, ‑antia (from present participial stems ‑ent‑, ‑ant‑). Since   the 16th cent. many inconsistencies   have occurred in the use of ‑ence and   ‑ance.   Is this for real?  There really is no rule?
22324
As a nonnative speaker of English I was always taught in school that there are verbs that cannot be used in the continuous form, i.e.  the stative verbs. However, I've seen some stative verbs used in the continuous form in American English, especially the verbs wish, feel, hope, guess, love and like. Is using these stative verbs in the continuous form wrong? If it's not, what's the difference between using them in the simple and continuous forms?
58215
I was just copyediting  and my native English speaker Sprachgefühl told me I had to correct the grammar of one sentence:     ... 5–6 weeks are a lot of time ...   by changing the are to is. But as I was doing so I started wondering why is it that in this case it seems that I have to make the verb disagree with the plural subject?  So is my feeling for English going bad or if I did the right thing, how could I explain this to somebody who's learning English for instance?