This is a description of the motivation and overall organization of the OWL language for knowledge representation. OWL consists of a linguistic memory system (LMS), a memory of concepts in terms of which all English phrases and all knowledge of an application domain are represented; a theory of English grammar which tells how to map English phrases into concepts; a parser to perform that mapping for individual sentences; and an interpreter to carry out procedures which are written in the same representational formalism. The system has been applied to the study of interactive dialogs, explanations of its own reasoning, and question answering. (Author/AM)