Word: britain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...road between Battersea and Vauxhall, known for, among other things, its bus station, a large supermarket and one of London's busiest gay saunas. The new location will, however, place the embassy closer to the British parliament at Westminster, and is within walking distance from the headquarters of MI6, Britain's secret intelligence service...
...States Congress and local planning authorities approve the move. Unlike most of its embassies around the world, the United States does not own outright the land surrounding its British facility; it is currently leased (like much of the rest of the borough) from the Duke of Westminster, one of Britain's richest...
...four vice presidents and ten secretaries of state have served at Grosvenor Square. In the late 18th century, John Adams, America's first Ambassador to the Court of St. James, opened a diplomatic post there, and in 1938 the Square became home to America's main diplomatic mission to Britain. During WWII, the Square earned the nickname "Little America" when Dwight D. Eisenhower placed his military headquarters on its leafy grounds...
...feminists examining muliebrity (the condition of being a woman), or soothsayers putting out their latest vaticination (prophecy), the available lexicon may soon get slimmer. The lexicographers behind Britain's Collins English Dictionary have decided to exuviate (shed) rarely used and archaic words as part of an abstergent (cleansing) process to make room for up to 2,000 new entries. "We want the dictionary to be a reflection of English as it is currently spoken," says Ian Brookes, managing editor of Collins, "rather than a fossilized version of the language...
...number of public figures in Britain have stepped forward to champion specific words, hoping to demonstrate they are compossible (possible in coexistence) with everyday speech. Andrew Motion, Britain's poet laureate since 1999, selected skirr, which refers to the rattling, scratchy noise that a bird's wings make during flight. "It's an appealing word with an onomatopoeic value and resonance," he says. Motion, an avid bird watcher, has already used the word on an evening radio program and hopes to include it in a poem if he can do so without "wrenching things around too much...