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."
    
    Download
    
    
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