We are back from living three years in Gujo Hachiman, Gifu Prefecture. It was an amazing three years. We met some great people, made good friends, and learned about Japanese culture, cooking, and language.

Now we live in New York City, and I will use this blog to continue posting about life in New York.

I also plan to post weekly topics about the English language for people back in Japan, or anywhere, who study English and want to know some fun or interesting things about the language.

To start us off, I was listening to a news broadcast recently, and I heard the sentence, "Customer Omar Khalifa says food prices have almost trebled in the past few weeks."

My wife, Noriko, looked at me and asked, "Trebled?" And I realized this would be a great word to explain. Treble simply means to increase by three times. I don't know why the reporter used treble instead of triple, which is much more common.

We have a bunch of counting words like that in English:

double=twice
triple/treble = thrice
quadruple = 4 times
quintuple = 5 times
sextuple = 6 times

I've seen all those examples in writing, but they are rarely used. Anyway, I hope someone studying English finds this interesting. If you want more posts like this, please let me know in the comments.