Methodology

Where the underlying data comes from

The raw word-form facts behind every GrammarNook entry — a verb's past tense and past participle, a noun's plural, which of two confusable words takes which meaning — are cross-checked against Wiktionary, the collaboratively edited dictionary project, and standard published dictionary and usage-guide references (works like Merriam-Webster, the Associated Press Stylebook, and the Chicago Manual of Style, depending on the specific question a given entry is answering). Wiktionary's content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), which carries two obligations this site takes seriously: attribute Wiktionary as a source, which this page does, and share any content substantially derived from it under a compatible license. Where a GrammarNook entry draws directly on Wiktionary-sourced word-form data, that derived material is licensed onward under CC-BY-SA rather than treated as fully proprietary.

What "cross-checked" actually means in practice

Wiktionary is a strong source for the mechanical facts — what a verb's past tense is, what a noun's accepted plural forms are — but it isn't treated as the sole authority on its own. Where a word has genuinely disputed or split usage (British versus American preference, formal versus casual register, a form that style guides disagree on), the entry is checked against at least one additional published usage reference before a claim about "standard" or "accepted" usage is written down. Where sources themselves disagree — and for some of the messier corners of English, they do — the entry says so plainly rather than presenting one side as settled fact.

How entries are chosen

Entries aren't picked at random or generated to hit a page count. Each verb, noun, and confusable-word pair on GrammarNook is a word or pair genuinely searched often — the specific irregular verbs people actually mistype the past tense of ("swum" versus "swam"), the specific nouns whose plurals cause real confusion ("octopus," "cactus," "criteria"), and the specific word pairs people routinely mix up ("affect" versus "effect," "who's" versus "whose"). If a word doesn't have a genuinely confusable or interesting form behind it, it doesn't get a page just to pad out a category.

The accuracy standard

No entry states a fact — an etymology, a historical claim about when a usage rule was invented, a statistic about which spelling is more common — that hasn't been checked against a real source. Where the historical record is uncertain (several etymologies on this site, like disputed word origins, are genuinely contested among linguists), the entry says "likely" or "probably" rather than inventing a tidy, confident-sounding answer that isn't actually supported. If an error is found in a published entry, it gets corrected — reach out via the contact page and it will be looked into directly.