Few words so rile language purists as the use of the adverb “literally” in a figurative sense, as in, “That movie literally blew my mind.” But as a linguist who studies how English has changed over ...

What does literally mean? A very long time ago, the word had a single official definition. “Truly” and “actually” come close to this meaning; the original Merriam-Webster definition was “in a literal ...