Last week, we talked about how to look up past participles in your dictionary. Here’s a condensed lesson: For any irregular verb, the past tense and past participle are listed right after the entry ...

In her helpful handbook “Grammar Power,” author Jane Schwartz asserts that lay and lie are “probably the two most confusing verbs in English.” She would get no argument from me. In fact, the first ...

Of the various forms of the vexing verbs “lay” and “lie,” the rarest is “lain.” So I was particularly disheartened to see this recently in the first third of a 64-word sentence: “much of the forest ...

What are the most common emails to our corrections inbox? (Besides those accusing us of favoring one side or the other in whatever is the hot debate of the day.) They're the ones that go something ...