Do you know the oldest word in English? What about the shortest sentence? These are 25 things you probably never knew about the English language.
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In 1934 Websters accidentally added a made up word to the dictionary — “dord”. It wasn’t caught until 5 years later
Ernest Vincent Wright’s book “Gadsby: A Lipogram Novel” is roughly 50,000 words long. None of them contain the letter “e”.
Dreamt is the only word in the English language that ends in “mt”
While most people believe that no English word rhymes with “orange”, that is not true. “Sporange” is a rare botanical term referring to part of a fern.
The longest one syllable word is “scraunched” with 10 letters. It can be found in a 17th century translation of Don Quixote
Words typically will be in use for anywhere between 1000 and 20,000 years.
The oldest word in English is “who” which has been around for, you guessed it…20,000 years.
The words “two”, “three”, and “I” are pretty old as well
English contains the most words out of any language and the Oxford English Corpus contains a little over 2 billion words (yes…billion)
It has been estimated that a new word is created every 98 minutes.
This works out to about 4,000 words per year being added to official dictionaries
The dot above the “i” and “j” is called a tittle
The word “drunk” is in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most synonyms at 2,964
The longest word in English with all its letters in alphabetical order is “aegilops”. “Almost” is actually not far behind it.
the, be, to, of, and, a, in ,that, have, and I make up 25% of the words you use
“Angry” and “hungry” are the only two words in modern English that end with “-gry”.
The shortest complete sentence in the English language is “I am”.
The following sentence demonstrates all nine ways that “ough” can be pronounced: “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”
The longest English word without a true vowel is “rythm”
The following sentence contains 7 identical words in a row and still makes sense: “It is true for all that that that that that that that refers to is not the same that that that that refers to.”
The word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, beta
A sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet is called a “pangram”.
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2014-06-27 17:41:59
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