Interesting Facts About English

in no particular order...

1. The most common letter in English is "e".
   
2. The most common vowel in English is "e", followed by "a".
   
3. The most common consonant in English is "r", followed by "t".
   
4. Every syllable in English must have a vowel (sound). Not all syllables have consonants.
   
5. Only two English words in current use end in "-gry". They are "angry" and "hungry".
   
6. The word "bookkeeper" (along with its associate "bookkeeping") is the only unhyphenated English word with three consecutive double letters. Other such words, like "sweet-toothed", require a hyphen to be readily readable.
   
   
7. The word "triskaidekaphobia" means "extreme fear of the number 13". This superstition is related to "paraskevidekatriaphobia", which means "fear of Friday the 13th".
   
8. More English words begin with the letter "s" than with any other letter.
   
9. A preposition is always followed by a noun (ie noun, proper noun, pronoun, noun group, gerund).
   
10. The word "uncopyrightable" is the longest English word in normal use that contains no letter more than once.
    
11. A sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet is called a "pangram".
    
12. The following sentence contains all 26 letters of the alphabet: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." This sentence is often used to test typewriters or keyboards.
    
13. The only word in English that ends with the letters "-mt" is "dreamt" (which is a variant spelling of "dreamed") - as well of course as "undreamt" :)
    
14. A word formed by joining together parts of existing words is called a "blend" (or, less commonly, a "portmanteau word"). Many new words enter the English language in this way. Examples are "brunch" (breakfast + lunch); "motel" (motorcar + hotel); and "guesstimate" (guess + estimate). Note that blends are not the same as compounds or compound nouns, which form when two whole words join together, for example: website, blackboard, darkroom.
    
15. The word "alphabet" comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, bēta.
    
16. The dot over the letter "i" and the letter "j" is called a "superscript dot".
    
17. In normal usage, the # symbol has several names, for example: hash, pound sign, number sign.
    
18. In English, the @ symbol is usually called "the at sign" or "the at symbol".
    
19. If we place a comma before the word "and" at the end of a list, this is known as an "Oxford comma" or a "serial comma". For example: "I drink coffee, tea, and wine."
    
20. Some words exist only in plural form, for example: glasses (spectacles), binoculars, scissors, shears, tongs, gallows, trousers, jeans, pants, pyjamas (but note that clothing words often become singular when we use them as modifiers, as in "trouser pocket").
    
21. The shortest complete sentence in English is the following. "I am."
    
22. The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat" meaning "the king is helpless".
    
23. We pronounce the combination "ough" in 9 different ways, as in the following sentence which contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
    
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24. The longest English word without a true vowel (a, e, i, o or u) is "rhythm".
    
25. The only planet not named after a god is our own, Earth. The others are, in order from the Sun, Mercury, Venus, [Earth,] Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
    
26. There are only 4 English words in common use ending in "-dous": hazardous, horrendous, stupendous, and tremendous.
    
27. We can find 10 words in the 7-letter word "therein" without rearranging any of its letters: the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.
    
28. 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." (= It is true for all that, that that "that" which that "that" refers to is not the same "that" which that "that" refers to.)
    
    

    It is true for all	that	that	that	that	that	that	that
    	pro- noun	con- junction	determiner	noun	relative pronoun	determiner	noun
    			(adjective)	"that"	which	(adjective)	"that"

    
    

    refers to is not the same	that	that	that	that	refers to.
    	noun	relative pronoun	determiner	noun
    	"that"	which	(adjective)	"that"

    
    A sentence with a similar pattern, which may help to unravel the above, is:
    It is true, despite everything you say, that this word which this word refers to is not the same word which this word refers to.
    Or, if you insist on being really correct:
    It is true, despite everything you say, that this word to which this word refers is not the same word to which this word refers.
    
    
29. The "QWERTY keyboard" gains its name from the fact that its first 6 letter keys are Q, W, E, R, T and Y. On early typewriters the keys were arranged in such a way as to minimize the clashing of the mechanical rods that carried the letters.

10 Mnemonic Tricks for Never Forgetting Anything Again.

1. The rhyme.

For hundreds of years, schoolchildren started the study of American history with: "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue."

2. The verbal gimmick.

Clearly, modern civilization would be impossible without these four words: "Spring forward. Fall back."

3. The poem.

Probably a million people every day resort to this famous six-liner:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one
Excepting February alone:
Which hath but twenty-eight, we find,
Till leap year gives it twenty-nine.

4. The easy association.

Many people have trouble with these similar words —desert, dessert — until they remember that when it comes to tasty treats like cake and ice cream, you always want an extra helping — just as the word itself has an extra s. 

5. The contrived association.

The essential trick is to focus on something odd or funny, and use that to jog your memory. All the memory experts are doing this when they rattle off the names of many people: Bob is big and bald; Charlie has a chin as big as China. And so on. 
These two words are killers: stalactite, stalagmite. But stalag means prison; and mite suggests mighty. Clearly, a fortress solidly on the ground. So the other thing has to be hanging from the ceiling.  

6. The acronym.

Suppose you have to buy three things: nails, plywood, and antifreeze. Use the initial letter of each item to create a word: PAN. Remember that. In the store, work in reverse, P-A-N, the letters reminding you what you have to buy. 
HOMES is a famous example. It tells us our Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior.
Almost as famous is Roy G. Biv, a phony name which tells the colors of the rainbow or spectrum (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet).

7. Cross words.

Acrostics are another thing entirely. You don't create a new word, you create a memorable phrase or sentence. The first letter of each word stands for the things you're trying to remember. In smart schools, middle-schoolers are given the task of inventing mnemonics for the 8 planets:  My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nachos (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus. Neptune).
The eight little bones in the wrist are a big task for anyone: Scaphoid, Lunate, Triquetral, Pisiform, Trapezium, Trapezoid, Capitate, Hamate. The job is easier, or at least funnier, with this: Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can't Handle.
Med school is next to impossible without mnemonics. One of the most famous reveals the names of the nerves that come directly through the skull (not the spinal column): On Old Olympus' Towering Top, A Finn And German Vaulted And Hopped. (Olfactory, Optic, Oculomotor, Trochlear, Trigeminal, Abducens, Facial, Auditory, Glossopharyngeal, Vagus, Accessory/Spinal, Hypoglossal.) 
When the auditory nerve was renamed the vestibulocochlear, Duke University Medical School held a contest for a new mnemonic. Here's the brilliant brainiac winner, circa 1980: Odor Of Orangutan Terrified Tarzan After Forty Voracious Gorillas Viciously Attacked Him. 

8. Numbers game.

If you want to know a long number, create a clever line in which the number of letters in each word tells the digit. For example, here's pi to 15 ingenious places: "How I like a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics." (3.14159265358979)

9. Making a speech the Greek way.

The Greeks were memory mavens, and actually had a Goddess of Memory (and mother of the Muses), Mnemosyne (ne-mos-se-nee).
And their biggest brain, Aristotle, wrote De Memoria et Recollectione. In Aristotle's psychology, the image is the basis of memory. For example, if you have to make a long speech, imagine that you're walking slowly through your house, and each piece of furniture, art, etc. prompts a paragraph.  

10. Digital frontier.

25 centuries after Aristotle we have Spacefem's surreal Mnemonic Generator. Feed it something, and you instantly get a mnemonic. How to spell mnemonic? Easy: Marks Navigate Empyrean Materials Once Numbers Inhabit Colors.

tree of language :)

When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor. An ancient source (say, Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which themselves have branches (West Germanic, North Germanic), which feed into specific languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian). Lessons on language families are often illustrated with a simple tree diagram that has all the information but lacks imagination. There’s no reason linguistics has to be so visually uninspiring. Minna Sundberg, creator of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent, a story set in a lushly imagined post-apocalyptic Nordic world, has drawn the antidote to the boring linguistic tree diagram.

Also worth checking out is the page before the tree, where she gives a comparison chart of words in the Nordic languages, and illustrates what an outlier Finnish is with the concept of “meow.”

You can order a poster version here. Read Stand Still. Stay Silent here. Also see Sundberg’s previous work, A Redtail’s Dream

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50 THINGS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW

50 THINGS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW (or 50 Completely Useless Facts!)
The word "queue" is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed. Beetles taste like apples, wasps like pine nuts, and worms  like fried bacon. Of all the words in the English language, the word 'set' has the most definitions! What is called a "French kiss" in the English speaking world is known as an "English kiss" in France. "Almost" is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order. "Rhythm" is the longest English word without a vowel. In 1386, a pig in France was executed by public hanging for the murder of a child A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off! Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete. You can't kill yourself by holding your breath There is a city called Rome on every continent. It's against the law to have a pet dog in Iceland! Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day! Horatio Nelson, one of England's most illustrious admirals was throughout his life, never able to find a cure for his sea-sickness. The skeleton of Jeremy Bentham is present at all important meetings of the University of London Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people Your ribs move about 5 million times a year, everytime you breathe! The elephant is the only mammal  that can't jump! One quarter of the bones in your body, are in your feet! Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different! The first known transfusion of blood was performed as early as 1667, when Jean-Baptiste, transfused two pints of blood from a sheep to a young man Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails! Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin! The present population of 5 billion plus people of the world is predicted to become 15 billion by 2080. Women blink nearly twice as much as men. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and had only ONE testicle.		Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs has been tasted by archaeologists and found edible. Months that begin on a Sunday will always have a "Friday the 13th." Coca-Cola would be green if colouring weren’t added to it. On average a hedgehog's  heart beats 300 times a minute. More people are killed each year from bees than from snakes. The average lead pencil will draw a line 35 miles long or write approximately 50,000 English words. More people are allergic to cow's milk than any other food. Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand. The placement of a donkey's eyes in its' heads enables it to see all four feet at all times! The six official languages of the United Nations are: English, French, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish. Earth is the only planet not named after a god. It's against the law to burp, or sneeze in a church in Nebraska, USA. You're born with 300 bones, but by the time you become an adult, you only have 206. Some worms will eat themselves if they can't find any food! Dolphins sleep with one eye open! It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open The worlds oldest piece of chewing gum is 9000 years old! The longest recorded flight  of a chicken is 13 seconds Queen Elizabeth I regarded herself as a paragon of cleanliness. She declared that she bathed once every three months, whether she needed it or not Slugs have 4 noses. Owls are the only birds who can see the colour blue. A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 69 years! A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue! The average person laughs 10 times a day! An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain --------------------------------------------------- One of these amazing, but useless facts is false. Do you know which one?

Shakespeare’s Development Of Early Modern English

Shakespeare’s Development Of Early Modern English:
                                                                                        Shakespeare is probably the most famous of all Englishmen. One of the things he is famous for is the effect he had on the development of the Early Modern English language. For example, without even realising it, our everyday speech is full of words and phrases invented by Shakespeare. He was able to do that because English was changing as people modernised it in their normal workaday speech.  One of the ways the grammar was changing was that inflectional endings (suffixes that indicated the word’s grammatical functions in the way that many modern languages still have) had largely disappeared. Modern English was becoming wonderfully flexible and that was the background to the Renaissance explosion of the inventive language we see when we look at the poetry of the time. Shakespeare was a leading figure in that.  Writers were able to invent new uses for words with great freedom. For example, Caesar is able to say: ‘The wild disguise has almost anticked us all.’ An antic is a fool, which is a noun. Shakespeare turns it into a verb ‘to make a fool of.’ English was being set free to go where writers wanted to take it in their poetry. Shakespeare takes it where he likes throughout his texts, transforming the English language, pointing to the way we use it today. (Modern English is still changing and developing, of course, and you are playing a vital role in that as you pick up and use new phrases, borrow foreign words, incorporate other dialects into your speech and so on.)  There was a huge inflow of other European vocabulary into the English language as a result of Renaissance cross-pollination. That created new variations for English words. It allowed endless possibilities for Shakespeare. In Love’s Labours Lost he is able to exploit multiple meanings of one word to create a sentence like ‘Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile.’ – ‘intellect,’ ‘wisdom,’ ‘eyesight’ and ‘daylight’.  Generally speaking, the grammar of Early Modern English is identical to that of Modern English so there is little difficulty in that regard. There is one issue that seems to bother newcomers to Shakespeare, however. Teachers will often find students complaining: ‘All those thees and thous . It’s soooo old-fashioned and I can’t be bothered with it.’ Once again, this usage was in a state of transition and, as always, Shakespeare exploits that.  In Modern English we use the word “you” as both the singular and the plural form. In Old English, thou was used for addressing one person; ye for more than one. You was around then, and while thou and ye were used as a subject of a clause, you was used as the object. By the time of Early Modern English, the distinction between subject and object uses of ye and you had virtually disappeared, and you became the norm in all grammatical functions and social situations. Ye had become old-fashioned and so, when we see it in the Authorised Bible (‘Oh ye of little faith’) we are seeing that, in spite of the fact that you may think you understand the language in the Bible better than you do Shakespeare, Shakespeare is more modern!  By Shakespeare’s time in Early Modern English you was being used for both singular and plural, but in the singular it also had a role as an alternative to thou and thee . You was used by people of lower status to those above them (such as ordinary people to nobles, children to parents, servants to masters), and was also the formal way for the upper classes to talk to each other. By contrast, thou and thee were used by people of higher rank to those beneath them, and by the lower classes to each other; also, strangely enough, in addressing God, and in talking to witches, ghosts, and other supernatural beings. As a refection of the higher status of males in the male/female context a husband might address his wife as thou , and she might reply respectfully with you .  The use of thou and you also had an emotional dimension. Thou commonly expressed special intimacy or affection; you , formality, politeness, and distance. That form is still used in French today in the use of vous and tu . Thou might also be used by an inferior to a superior, to express such feelings as anger and contempt or to be insulting and this is one of the areas where Shakespeare is able to get extra levels of meaning by showing disrespect by one character for another’s status. The use of thou to a person of equal rank could be used as an insult. Sir Toby Belch advises Sir Andrew Aguecheek on how to write a challenge to the Count’s youth, Viola: ‘if thou thou’st him somethrice, it shall not be amiss’ (Twelfth Night). (Read more on this topic on our guide to meanings of thee and thou.)  Shakespeare was acutely aware of the way the Early Modern English language that he grew up with was changing and it is yet another way that he was able to create the levels of meaning that made him such an enduring writer. When students take the trouble to understand the use of the thees and thous they are able to appreciate the additional meaning rather than seeing them as a difficulty.