Your parents would not give their ascent to your desire to attend a party. An airplane would not make an assent to a cruising altitude. Although these two words sound exactly the same, they do not share the same meaning. Assent may be a noun or a verb – in its noun form, assent means

In The Life of Pi, the eponymous Pi compares animals in the wild to animals in a zoo, saying, “Animals in the wild are, in practice, free neither in space nor in time, nor in their personal relations. In theory – that is, as a simple physical possibility – an animal could pick up and

  Proscribe and prescribe are two of the most commonly confused words in the English language. And no wonder: Their etymologies are nearly identical, their spellings are nearly identical, but their meanings are completely opposite!