It is often said that the English language is particularly rich in vocabulary, but to make such a statement we need to know what words to count and what counts as a word.

Grammar books are written for many purposes and with different users in mind. What are the particular problems of the scholarly reference grammar towards the end of the 20th century?

Et talks to Maureen Stack, editor of a sister periodical with a worldwide clientele.

The editor of a quarterly devoted to the analysis and exposure of doublespeak describes some prize specimens and how his organization counters them.

A wide range of newspapers, news-letters, cuttings and clippings, catalogues and correspondence arrives (and is welcomed) on ET's editorial desk. From the mass that goes into our files comes this mix of couth comments, odd usages, consumer-conscious acronyms, sexual neologisms, and arcane expressions.

In ET1, Jenny Cheshire looked at male bias and in ET2 Mary Brown Parlee discussed ‘genderlects’ and conversational politics. A Danish linguist now presents some evidence that women and men do use the language differently.

In ET6, Gillian Kay described how Japanese absorbs and re-shapes the words of English. There is, however, another trend in Japan, in which English is used as a social and commercial accessory.

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick, recently editor of the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, has just completed the latest revision of Roget's Thesaurus for Longman. What is the history and purpose of this now venerable tome?

ELIZABETH-ANNE MALISCHEWSKI describes how, through transliteration and adaptation, English words have been adopted into Chinese. The term KĀI FÀNG, whose characters are shown above, means ‘open-free’ and is used for Deng Xiao-ping's ‘open-door policy’.