Handy 990
Language Notes
Not about the app and not about exam tactics — about English itself: why spelling comes in two systems, which rules are really one dictionary's decision in one particular year, and which "typos" are not typos at all. Every piece cites checkable sources.
Published · 2026-11-01
How Canadians Measure Things: Celsius Outside, Fahrenheit in the Oven, Pounds on the Scale, and Distance in Hours
Canada began going metric in 1970, and half a century later it still mixes the two systems: Celsius for the weather, Fahrenheit for the oven, litres of milk, feet for height, and for the distance between two cities, "about four hours." The flowchart How to Measure Things Like a Canadian is a joke, but the polls mostly back it up. This post takes the chart apart, then covers a jet that ran out of fuel over a unit mix-up, and phrases like 15-inch and five foot ten. Just for fun.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-28
Words of the Year: From brain rot to maxxing, what 2024–2026 says about English
From brain rot to optimizing everything, the words chosen by Dictionary.com, Collins, Merriam-Webster and Oxford tell stories about online culture, AI and social change.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-23
What is the Transatlantic accent? Old Hollywood's voice was taught to Americans by an Australian and a Canadian
Watch a Hollywood film from the 1930s or '40s and the actors sound strange: no American r, a whiff of England, yet unmistakably American. This is the Transatlantic accent, also called the Mid-Atlantic accent — "the accent from the middle of the ocean" — and nobody ever grew up speaking it naturally. It was taught in classrooms: an Australian phonetician designed it, and a Canadian wrote the textbook. Here is where it came from, how to spot it, why it nearly vanished after World War II, and the most useful lesson it holds for TOEIC learners: there is no such thing as a neutral accent.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-22
How to address someone in an English email: Dear Mr. Chen or Dear Wei-Ming — and which of your names is the "first name"?
Writing to a client in English, do you open with Dear Mr. Chen or Dear Wei-Ming? Why is "Mr. Wei-Ming" wrong, and what do you write when you don't know the person's name or can't tell whether they're a man or a woman? This post starts from one email in the official TOEIC sample test and works outward: first name and last name have nothing to do with which name comes first, in English business writing Mr./Ms./Dr. go with the family name, when you can switch to first names, how to choose between Best regards and Sincerely, and why some people write their family name in capitals, as in CHEN Wei-Ming — plus how names from East and Southeast Asia actually behave in English.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-21
Metaphors in business English: why you don't "fire" a new product — campaign, target and ballpark were borrowed from battlefields and ballparks
To launch a product is to bring it out, not to fire it into the sky. launch first meant to hurl something like a lance; then to send a ship into the water; only later to start something off, and later still to send up a rocket. Business English is full of words borrowed from other worlds like this: campaign, strategy and target come from war; ballpark, touch base and drop the ball come from sport, especially American baseball; pipeline, bottleneck and feedback come from pipes, bottles and circuits. Starting from Lakoff and Johnson's 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, this post walks through three worlds that lend a great many words, how often they turn up on the TOEIC, and how other languages borrowed from the same places.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-20
Is "I before E, except after C" true? We counted 10,000 common English words, and science and weird don't play along
"I before E, except after C" is probably the most famous spelling rule in English, yet science, weird, their and eight all ignore it. We checked it against a 10,000-word frequency list, our own vocabulary bank and our TOEIC question bank. Taken literally, it is right only about two times in three in real text, and after c there are more cie words than cei words. This post covers why the rule fails, why ie and ei are such a mess, and the version of the rule — one extra condition — that actually works quite well.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-19
"The staff is" or "the staff are"? Why British and American English disagree about collective nouns
A TOEIC grammar question — The IT department ___ currently migrating all files — wants is. Put the same sentence in a British newspaper and are would pass too. Nouns for a group of people, like team, committee, family and government, almost always take a singular verb in American English, while British English can treat them as a group of individuals and use the plural. Using a corpus grammar and a usage guide, this post sorts out where the two sides differ, why a singular verb can end up with they, why staff and police break the pattern, and how to choose between a number of and the number of.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-18
Oversee vs. overlook: English words that are their own opposites, and why oversight means both supervision and a mistake
"The committee has oversight of the budget" means the committee watches the money; "The missing invoice was an oversight" means nobody noticed it was missing. Same word, opposite jobs: one sentence has someone watching, the other has nobody seeing. Words like this are called contronyms. This post starts with oversee and overlook — four hundred years ago oversee could mean "pretend not to see" and overlook could mean "supervise" — then looks at how cleave, fast, sanction, dust and left grew opposite meanings, and ends with how to tell them apart on the TOEIC.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-17
Why does English use the past tense to be polite? The distance in "I was wondering" and "Could you", and why TOEIC Part 2 answers dodge the question
"I was wondering if you could help me" is about right now, so why is it in the past tense? Because English borrows distance in time and uses it as distance between people: could, would, might, I was hoping, Did you want… all push a request or question one step back and leave the listener room to say no. This piece explains how this "attitudinal past" works, why polite English so often talks around things, and how that explains the correct answers on TOEIC Part 2 that never seem to answer the question.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-16
Color Idioms in Business English: A Green Room Isn't Green, and "In the Red" Isn't a Good Day on the Market
A green room is a backstage lounge, red tape is bureaucracy, a blue-chip stock is a safe bet and a pink slip means you've been let go. Business English is full of color words whose meaning you can't see in the color. Starting from a reader's report, this post sorts more than a dozen common ones into four groups — money, work, permission and paperwork, and the gray zone — traces each color back to the object it came from (ink, ribbon, poker chips, shirts, paper), and separates the origins that are on record from the ones that are just good stories. And honestly: the TOEIC rarely tests these, but if you read English business news or work in English, you are likely to meet them.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-15
Why "a five-year plan" and not "a five-years plan"? Number + noun before a noun: no s, add a hyphen
Five years is five years, but a plan that lasts that long is a five-year plan: the s disappears and a hyphen turns up. When a number and a unit go in front of another noun as a modifier, the unit goes back to the singular and is usually hyphenated: a ten-minute walk, a three-day conference, a 50-page report. This post covers where that rule comes from, why sales department keeps its s, the possessive ten minutes' walk that keeps the plural, and when a hyphen is needed and when it isn't.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-14
Where do English irregular verbs come from? went didn't start out as the past tense of go
The past tense of go is went, and the two words look nothing alike — because went was originally the past tense of a different verb, wend, and go only took it over some five hundred years ago. This post is about where irregular verbs come from: sing, sang, sung follows a rule older than -ed; a 2007 paper in Nature calculated that the rarer a verb is, the faster it turns regular; and snuck is moving the other way. At the end: the past participles you meet most in TOEIC reading, and pairs like found and founded that are easy to misread.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-13
English numbers vs 萬: why 15 萬 is "150 thousand", 1 億 is "100 million", and 1.000 means a thousand in Vietnam
Chinese, Japanese and Korean count big numbers in blocks of four digits — 萬, then 億; English counts in blocks of three — thousand, million, billion. So 15 萬 is "one hundred fifty thousand", 1 億 is "one hundred million", and a TOEIC recording plays each sentence only once. This post gives a conversion table and two mental shortcuts, then covers how English numbers are said aloud — whether to put "and" in "one hundred and fifty", why $12.50 is often "twelve fifty", how years and room numbers are read, why a British billion used to be a million million — and finally 1,000.50 versus 1.000,50: in Vietnam and much of Europe, the decimal point and the thousands separator trade places.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-12
Buy or purchase? Why TOEIC English sounds so formal: the three floors of English vocabulary
In one official TOEIC sample question the speaker says bought and the answer says purchase; and most learners picture TOEIC English as full of assist, inquire and commence. Why does English have two sets of words to swap between? Because its vocabulary was built in layers: an everyday ground floor of Old English, a middle floor of French borrowed after the Normans conquered England in 1066, and a top floor of learned words taken straight from Latin and Greek around the Renaissance. This post starts from one question in the official ETS sample test, looks at how the three floors were built, where the "cow is English, beef is French" story is too neat, and then counts real words in our own question bank to see which floor the TOEIC actually lives on. The answer is the middle one, and the stiffest words are far rarer than you might think.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-11
What is an eggcorn? For all intensive purposes, should of, and the phrases native speakers mishear and then "fix"
For all intensive purposes, deep-seeded, nip it in the butt, free reign — native speakers really do write these, and they get them wrong in a remarkably sensible way: the writer never caught the original word, so they swapped in one that sounds the same and still makes sense. Linguists call this kind of mistake an eggcorn, after someone wrote "egg corn" for acorn in 2003. This post covers how an eggcorn differs from a malapropism, a mondegreen and folk etymology, lists eleven phrases that often get "fixed" and what they originally meant, and then turns to the one that matters on the TOEIC listening section: why should've sounds like should of.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-10
How to learn phrasal verbs: why "went with" means "chose" — and why up, out, off and down aren't random
A reader reported a mistake: "went with doesn't mean choose." It does — dictionaries list go with as "accept" or "choose", so We went with Oakridge simply means "we picked Oakridge". Phrasal verbs often can't be worked out from their parts, but the little word at the end is not random: up often means "up, more" or "all the way", out means "out, found", off means "away, cancelled", and down means "down, less". This post covers what those little words keep meaning, why fill in and fill out mean the same thing, and where phrasal verbs hide in the official TOEIC sample test.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-09
English words from Asian languages: ketchup had no tomatoes, and tea and chai are one word that took two roads
ketchup, tea, typhoon, tycoon, emoji, pho — all of these English words have an East or Southeast Asian connection, though not always a simple or settled one, and many of their histories are far more tangled than the versions that circulate online. This post runs from a Hokkien fish brine to Dutch trading ships, and from the shogun's diplomatic title to the 26 Korea-related words the Oxford English Dictionary added in a single update in 2021, debunking a few popular folk etymologies along the way. Fair warning: this one is purely for fun. It will not add a single point to your TOEIC score.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-08
Why "look forward to seeing," not "to see"? English has two words spelled *to*
The to in "want to see" takes a plain verb; the to in "look forward to seeing" takes -ing. That isn't an exception. English has two words spelled to: an infinitive marker that is followed by a bare verb, and a preposition, the same kind of word as for and of, that takes a noun or an -ing form, not a bare verb. This piece starts from a reader's report, gives you a one-word test (can you put "it" after the to?), lists the common prepositional to's (be used to, be committed to, object to, with a view to and more), untangles "used to work" from "be used to working," explains why the two to's were a single word a thousand years ago, and ends with the places the test breaks down.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-07
Why does English have silent letters? The k in knight was once spoken; the b in debt never was
knight sounds exactly like night, and the b in debt, the s in island and the p in receipt are just as quiet. English silent letters are not scattered at random. Most of them belong to one of two kinds: letters that were once pronounced and then fell silent, like the k and gh in knight; and letters that were never pronounced at all, added later by scholars, like the b in debt — some of which were added by mistake. This post covers where both kinds came from, how printing froze them on the page, how Shakespeare mocked a pedant who insisted on sounding the b, and what silent letters are actually good for when you learn English.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-05
What is ASD-STE100? Simplified Technical English, the language of aircraft manuals: 875 words, one meaning each, no semicolons
In early October, X lit up with a tip from Andrej Karpathy: ask the AI to write in ASD-STE100, and what it writes gets much easier to read. ASD-STE100 is a simplified English designed for aircraft maintenance manuals: 875 approved words, one meaning per word, 20 words per sentence at most, and no -ing forms, perfect tenses, phrasal verbs or semicolons. To be clear up front: this post will not add a single point to your TOEIC score, but you may finish it with one more trick for talking to AI.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-04
What is the plural of fish? Why "the fish" can mean one fish or a whole school
A reader met The fish ___ swimming in a grammar drill that accepted only are, and reported: "The fish can also mean one fish." They were right. This post rounds up the English nouns whose singular and plural look the same — fish, sheep, deer, aircraft, series, headquarters — explains why they take no s (some of them are leftovers from Old English, a thousand years ago), when fishes is the right word, and where in the sentence to look when the noun won't tell you how many.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-02
Can you end a sentence with a preposition? Six school grammar rules that native writers break every day
"Never end a sentence with a preposition." "Never put an adverb between to and the verb." "Never start a sentence with And." You learned these rules — yet the official TOEIC sample test ends seven of its own questions with a preposition. This post traces six school rules back to where they came from: one is a poet's personal taste from 1672, one is a grammarian's "I should think" from 1770, and some are changing as we speak. Then it returns to the just now in a reader's report to show what a real grammar rule looks like, and which kind the TOEIC actually tests.
Read the article →Published · 2026-10-01
What is a linking verb? Adjective or adverb after look: the same look sometimes watches and sometimes just appears
A reader flagged one of our questions: "Doesn't look mean 'appear'? Then it should take an adjective." The rule they quoted is exactly right — the look in that question just isn't the "appear" kind. This post is about linking verbs (look, seem, become, remain …): a rope that ties a description back onto the subject. One quick test — swap in be — tells you whether a verb is describing its subject or doing something. Then we watch the official TOEIC sample test use both meanings of look inside a single conversation, sort out the five sense verbs that hold two jobs each, and end with feel badly, which even the dictionaries can't agree on.
Read the article →Published · 2026-09-30
TOEIC Part 7 Abbreviations: What n/a, Inc., ext. and Re: Mean — and Why Ms. Isn't an Abbreviation at All
Shopping carts, invoices, email headers and signatures in TOEIC Reading are full of abbreviations like n/a, Inc., #, ext. and Re: — and the answer to a question is often sitting right behind one. This post starts with a shopping cart from the official sample test, then sorts the abbreviations Part 7 actually uses into six groups: before names, after company names, times, addresses and phones, numbers and units, and letters. Along the way: why nobody spells out Mrs., why No. has an o in it, why RSVP is French, and why Ms. isn't short for anything.
Read the article →Published · 2026-09-29
Discreet vs. discrete: the look-alike English words that spell-check can't catch and your ears can't hear
Discreet means careful; discrete means separate. They sound exactly alike and differ only by two swapped letters. This post starts from a reader's report: the two words were once a single Latin word that split around 1600. Then it takes six look-alike pairs that turn up in TOEIC reading — complement/compliment, stationary/stationery, principal/principle, affect/effect, personal/personnel, loose/lose — each with a way to remember it. And an honest finding: in the Part 5 questions of the official TOEIC sample test, not one item is built on a pair like these. They trip you up somewhere else.
Read the article →Published · 2026-09-27
How many meanings does "He saw her in the park with a telescope" have?
Take a guess first: in He saw her in the park with a telescope, who has the telescope, and who is in the park? You probably see one answer; the internet's standard answer is "six meanings". This post checks those six: linguists can draw only five grammatical trees for the sentence, yet the sixth reading isn't wrong — and once you also ask who is in the park and which kind of "with" this is, you get more than ten different pictures. Along the way: why every extra prepositional phrase adds a pile of possible structures, why human experts get only 93.2% right, and how to keep just one meaning when you write.
Read the article →Published · 2026-09-25
What does "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo…" mean? 10 English sentences that look like gibberish but are perfectly grammatical, parsed word by word
Fair warning: this one is purely for fun and will not raise your TOEIC score by a single point. English has a small collection of sentences built to torment readers — eight buffalo in a row, eleven hads in a row, four people named Will in one question — that look like a stuck keyboard but are perfectly grammatical. This post takes ten of them apart one at a time: most are rebuilt step by step from a short, normal sentence and laid out in a table showing the job of every word. At the end: how other languages do the same thing, and a sentence about a horse that linguists have been studying for fifty years.
Read the article →Published · 2026-09-25
A unique or an unique? A vs. an depends on the sound, not the letter: why it's a university but an hour
A learner reported that "a unique code" in one of our questions was a mistake: unique starts with u, so it should take an. In fact, a unique is correct. A and an never look at the first letter, only at the first sound. This post sets out the rule in one table, then looks at a question in the official TOEIC sample test where a used and an invoice sit side by side, sorts out the abbreviations that trip people up most (an MBA, an HR manager, a NASA engineer), and ends with some history: an is actually the original form, and English once misheard a nadder as an adder.
Read the article →Published · 2026-09-25
British vs. American English vocabulary: the British first floor is one flight up, a lift is an elevator, and tabling a proposal can start an argument
The last piece in this series was about spelling — theatre and theater. This one is about something harder: the same thing called by entirely different words on each side of the Atlantic. An elevator is a lift, an apartment is a flat, a line is a queue, two weeks is a fortnight, and a résumé is a CV. The one most likely to send you the wrong way is the floor: a British first floor is one flight above street level. And then there are the sneakier words that both sides use with different meanings — one of which started a real argument between British and American staff officers during the Second World War.
Read the article →Published · 2026-09-24
Bored or boring? How to choose between -ed and -ing adjectives: one question that settles it every time
Tell an interviewer "I'm very interesting in this position" and what they hear is "I am a fascinating person." The -ed/-ing adjective pair (bored/boring, interested/interesting, exhausted/exhausting) trips up learners everywhere, because many languages use one word for both sides of a feeling. This piece teaches a single test — who is doing the feeling? — works through question 131 of the official TOEIC sample test, and ends with a table of common pairs, the prepositions that follow them, and the exceptions that refuse to cooperate (including "experienced," from the very same test e-mail).
Read the article →Published · 2026-09-23
Everyday English words that change meaning at the office: sheets aren't bedding, bars aren't pubs, and outstanding doesn't mean excellent
Next to a printer, "sheets" are paper, not bedding; on a café menu, "bars" are chocolate bars, not pubs; on an invoice, "outstanding" means unpaid, not excellent. The TOEIC contains very few words you have never seen. What trips people up is this other kind of word — one you learned years ago that quietly takes on a different meaning at work. This piece explains why the most common words carry the most meanings (Zipf worked it out in 1945), shows how the official TOEIC sample test tests exactly this, and ends with a table of some forty words that "change faces" in the office.
Read the article →Published · 2026-09-20
wind and wind, two unrelated words that look exactly alike: one is /wɪnd/, the other /waɪnd/
The four letters w-i-n-d take up five entries and two pronunciations in Merriam-Webster. They are really two unrelated words that happen to share a spelling: one means moving air, the other means to turn or coil. This piece sorts out the common uses of each family (get wind of, second wind, wind up, wind down, winding road) and then deals with their past tense, wound — which is a trap of its own. Every pronunciation comes with audio, including one sentence that even our synthesized voice got wrong.
Read the article →Published · 2026-09-16
What is the 's in store names? Macy's is not Macy, and McDonald's is not McDonald
Many English learners swallow the 's at the end of store names: "I went to Macy," "Let's eat at McDonald." It sounds like a tiny tail, but in English Macy is a person and Macy's is the department store. This short piece covers three things: where the 's in a store name comes from (it means "belonging to"), how to pronounce it (three ways, with audio), and why some old British stores later dropped the apostrophe — but kept the s.
Read the article →Published · 2026-09-16
How to hear the difference between can and can't: English hides "not" in a t nobody pronounces
In many languages, "not" gets a full syllable of its own, and it is hard to miss. In English, the whole negative in can't rides on the final t — and Americans usually don't pronounce it. This piece covers three things: what actually separates can from can't in an American accent (stress, not the t); why British and Australian accents make it much easier (the vowel changes completely); and the exceptions that break the rule. Audio examples in American, British, and Australian accents are included so you can hear each point.
Read the article →Published · 2026-09-12
British vs. American spelling: theatre is not a typo, it just lost to an 1828 dictionary
Several users have recently reported theatre and centre in our questions as misspellings. They are not. They are British spellings, every bit as correct as theater and center — they simply stand on the other side of the Atlantic. This is the first post in a new series, Language Notes: we start with a clean table of the most common -er / -re pairs, then work through -or / -our, -ize / -ise, single vs. double l and the rest, with a detour into how a man named Noah Webster split English in two with a dictionary that barely sold — and which of his proposals were laughed out of the room (tung, wimmen, soop). At the end, an honest answer to "which one does the TOEIC use?" We counted.
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