This is a book for all of us who wonder where words in English come from, how they relate to each other, what patterns they occur in, how we store them in our minds, and what choices we make when we use words and why. This highly readable volume draws on multiple sources including many years of Michael McCarthy's excellent scholarship, corpus evidence, examples from varieties of English and a keen interest in language and language learning.

Averil Coxhead, Professor in Applied Linguistics, Victoria University of Wellington