As usual, Bill Bryson says it best: “English is a merry confusion of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense. This is a language where cleave can mean to cut in half or to hold two halves together; where the simple word set has 126 different meanings as a verb, 58 as a noun, and 10 as a participial adjective; where if you can run fast you are moving swiftly, but if you are stuck fast you are not moving at all; [and] where colonel, freight, once, and ache . . . are strikingly at odds with their spellings.”

As a copy editor for the London Times in the early 1980s, Bill Bryson felt keenly the lack of an easy-to-consult, authoritative guide to avoiding the traps in English, and so he wrote the book—his first, inaugurating his stellar career. Two decades later, revised and updated, it became Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words. Featuring real-world examples of questionable usage from an international array of publications, and with a helpful glossary and guide to punctuation, this precise, prescriptive, and often witty book belongs on the desk of every person who cares enough about the language not to misuse it.