20 Interesting Facts About the English Language - This is superb! Brilliant!
Today I'd like to share with you something written by Darrielle Cresswell and posted as a guest blog on Kath's Blog at For Reading Addicts, March 4, 2015.
Here is the link: http://forreadingaddicts.co.uk/language/20-interesting-facts-about-the-english-language/147
(My favorite part is about the "ough" words, which we cover in TGM's Home Early Learning Play School):
English, born from so many other tongues, and being so rich in texture and depth, is an extraordinary language. There are over 600,000 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, and thanks to corruptions, misinterpretations, altercations and evolution, the language throws up many interesting quirks.
English just has so many words! There are many words that mean almost the same thing, words that are archaic, and words that don’t always seem to fit in due to the language constantly evolving. Here are a few fascinating facts about the English language we’ve put together for you. We hope you enjoy them!
Only two words in the English language end in ‘–gry’ these are angry and hungry. We can’t help but think these two things are somehow connected.
The word bookkeeper is the only unhyphenated English word with three consecutive double letters.
The letter E is the most used letter in the English language and accounts for a massive 11% of the written word.
The shortest –ology in the dictionary is oology, the scientific study of eggs.
The word uncopyrightable is the longest word in the dictionary where no letter is repeated twice.
When you cup your hands together to create a bowl it’s known as a gowpen.
The longest non-medical word in the English dictionary is floccinaucinihilipilification. It means the habit of estimating something as worthless.
The words facetious and abstemious are the only two words in English that contain all of the vowels in the correct order.
A sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet is called a pangram. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is the most famous example of a pangram.
The only word in the dictionary that ends with -mt is dreamt, the variant of dreamed.
Used as a verb, owl means ‘to act wisely despite knowing nothing’.
The dot over the ‘i’ and ‘j’ in English is called a tittle.
The word checkmate comes from a Persian phrase ‘Shah Mat’, which translates as ‘The King is helpless’.
The combination of letters -ough can be pronounced in 9 different ways (hold onto your hats USA)! The following sentence contains them all: “The rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a plough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”
The longest word in the dictionary without any vowels is rhythm.
Flabellation is the use of a fan to cool something down.
Scarecrows were once known as hobidy-boobies.
When skateboarding first took off it was known as sidewalk surfing.
In written English the letter Q only appears once in every 500 letters. It appears 4 times in this piece, including the one in the previous sentence.
A word formed by joining together two parts of existing words is called a portmanteau word and many new words are added to the dictionary this way. Brunch is a portmanteau of breakfast and lunch, while motel is a portmanteau of motorcar and hotel. It is said that Oscar Wilde pushed duds (clothes) and attitude together to create dude.
We hope you enjoyed those little English facts, feel free to add your own in the comments!
Here was my comment:
There are only 4 words (and their variations) that start with “dw” – dwell (dwelling, dwellings, dwelled, dwelt), dwarf, dweeb, dwindle (dwindles, dwindled, dwindling). Dweeb is slang.
Don't you just love it?!
