Dear Lahna,

Your question made me think about how words change. The dictionary adds new words and definitions all the time.

The latest update to the Oxford English Dictionary added jelly, meaning jealous. It also included drop bear. That’s an imaginary scary-koala that appears in stories.

I asked my friend Nikolaus Overtoom how we got the abbreviation for ounces. He’s a professor of ancient history at Washington State University.

It turns out ounces—and later oz—evolved as words traveled from Ancient Rome through Medieval Europe and into England.

“The mixture of linguistic elements in English makes it one of the most flexible, diverse and complex … » More …

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