H. W. Fowler in the context of "The Times"

An epithet (from Ancient Greek ἐπίθετον (epítheton) 'adjective', from ἐπίθετος (epíthetos) 'additional'), also a byname, is a descriptive term (word or phrase) commonly accompanying or occurring in place of the name of a real or fictitious person, place, or thing. It is usually literally descriptive, as in Alfred the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent, Richard the Lionheart, and Ladislaus the Short, or allusive, as in Edward the Confessor, William the Conqueror, Æthelred the Unready, John Lackland, Mehmed the Conqueror and Bloody Mary.

The word epithet also may refer to an abusive, defamatory, or derogatory word or phrase. This use is criticized by Martin Manser and other proponents of linguistic prescription. H. W. Fowler noted in 1926 that "epithet is suffering a vulgarization that is giving it an abusive imputation".

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by H. W. Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage and writing. It covers a wide range of topics that relate to usage, including: plurals, nouns, verbs, punctuation, cases, parentheses, quotation marks, the use of foreign terms, and so on. The dictionary became the standard for other style guides to writing in English. The 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, which was edited by Ernest Gowers, and was reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition, re-titled The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, and revised in 2004, was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield as a usage dictionary that incorporated corpus linguistics data. The 2015 fourth edition, re-titled Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was edited by Jeremy Butterfield as a usage dictionary. Informally, readers refer to the style guide and dictionary as Fowler's Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler's.