Recently in UsingEnglish Content Category

The idioms section has had a display problem recently, with some html code appearing, so people may have seen entries with same strange bits using < >. Sorry for this; I have been going through and removing them.

Though the term information superhighway seems to have been consigned to history, the internet, in many ways, resembles a demolition derby more than a sleek road. Every year I clear out the dead links from our ESL links database; even though we add a new link most days, we now how forty fewer links than we did at the start of the year.

We currently have a list of nearly two thousand phrasal verbs. The distribution of particles/adverbs/prepositions is, however, dominated by a very small number: the top six account for well over a half of the total. After that, the next few account for most of the rest of the list, and it tails off very quickly; phrasal verbs are dominated by a very small number of particles.

We are adding a new section to the site that will be text-based, with texts and comprehension exercises. It is new, so it is still very small, but we will be adding to it on a regular basis. Please free to contact us to make suggestions or correct any mistakes.

We are canvassing opinions about accessing the site, the forum in particular, and would be very interested in any comments people might have, both positive and negative, about the procedures to sign up, etc.

I have just cleaned out our links database, which I do once a year. About 10% of the links were broken, similar to last year. Unless ESL is particularly bad for this, it doesn't bode well for the web. So much of the web is dependent on links, yet such a high breakage rate means that after a few years much of it will be unreadable, and particularly in areas like blogs where people tend to respond to things they have seen on the web and post their thoughts and the link.

We have just updated the Phrasal Verb section of the site and it now automatically creates quizzes based on the definitions of the verbs. One of the types of quizzes uses the particles and, therefore, generates a list. We have over 1,400 phasal verbs, which is a fairly representative sample, and it is clear that a small number of particles dominate: up, out, on, off, in and down account for about 65% of the total. Here's the full particle list:

We have recently had a spate of comments in our Polls section which contain lists of URLs to gambling sites, offers for herbal viagra, dodgy diet pills and the rest of the rubbish people keep finding in their inboxes. We would like to apologise for this. When this started happening to our Weblogs, we were able to buy software that meant that any comment had to be approved, which guaranteed that such posts were deleted before they appeared onsite.

We have reached the end of another year and have the following:

1781 links

438 polls

33 tests with 652 questions

190 public quizzes + 74 for members

746 idioms

280 glossary entries

Site forum: Threads: 9,396, Posts: 50,249, Members: 3,652

It will be interesting to see where we are a year from now.

We have updated our Irregular Verb List to include a considerable number of verbs that were missing.