Arika Okrent

Linguist, Author, Mental Floss

Arika Okrent is a linguist and author with a joint PhD in linguistics and cognition and cognitive neuroscience from the University of Chicago. She is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages (2009) and Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme – and Other Oddities of the English Language (2021). She lives in Chicago and covers language for Mental Floss.

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Written by Arika Okrent

Close-up of a vintage book titled “Dictionary, Interpreting all such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, now used in our refined English Tongue.”

essay

Language and linguistics

Typos, tricks and misprints

Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology

Arika Okrent

A girl with a pink bicycle in front of a thatched hut, with other children visible inside the hut’s entrance.

essay

Language and linguistics

Is linguistics a science?

Much of linguistic theory is so abstract and dependent on theoretical apparatus that it might be impossible to explain

Arika Okrent