From redundant expressions to weird word origins, we count 50 strange and interesting facts
about the English language!
50 ‘Shit’ is one of the oldest and most versatile
words in the English language, with roots in Germanic and Scandinavian languages and
a recorded history dating back at least as far as 1086.
It originally meant ‘cattle diarrhoea’. 49
A ‘pangram’ is a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet.
The following sentence is the most famous example: ‘The quick brown fox jumps over
the lazy dog.’
It is often used to test typewriters or keyboards. 48
An ‘Oxford’ or ‘serial’ comma is a one that is placed immediately before a coordinating
conjunction at the end of a list.
Coordinating conjunctions include ‘and’, ‘or’, or ‘nor’.
47 ‘Shivviness’ is an old Yorkshire word
for the uncomfortable feeling of wearing new underwear.
‘Shiv’ is an old word for thick, coarse wool or linen.
46 Approximately one new word is added to the
English language every two hours.
At this rate, the dictionary grows by about 4,000 words a year.
45 The proper name for cutting your own hair
is self-tonsorialism.
‘Tonsorialist’ is an old-world word that encompasses several professions, including
barber.
44 The longest Modern English word without a
true vowel (a, e, i, o or u) is ‘rhythms’.
There are thought to be several longer archaic words, like the obsolete 17th Century words
‘symphysy’ and ‘twyndyllyngs’. 43
An autological word is one that describes itself -- like unhyphenated or short.
The shortest complete sentence in English is the following.
‘I am.’
42 ‘Gadzookery’, also called ‘tushery’,
is the deliberate use of old-fashioned language in modern writing.
It comes from the exclamation ‘gadzooks’, which some suggest is an alteration of ‘God's
hooks’, the nails of Christ’s crucifixion. 41
When weather turns bad, an ‘ombrifuge’ is anything or anywhere that provides shelter
from rain.
If the weather ‘flenches’ it means it’s failed to improve even though it looked like
it would.
40 The expression ‘to knuckle down’ originated
from the children’s game of marbles.
Players would put their knuckles to the ground in order to make their best shots.
39 We pronounce the combination ‘o-u-g-h’
in nine different ways.
This sentence 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.’
38 A preposition links nouns, pronouns and phrases
to other words in a sentence.
A preposition is always followed by a noun, proper noun, pronoun, noun group or gerund.
37 The past tense of ‘dare’ is ‘durst’.
However, the word is archaic and no longer widely used.
36 As a noun, an owl is ‘a night bird of prey’.
However, as a verb it means ‘to act wisely, despite knowing nothing’.
Informally, in its verb form, to owl can also mean ‘to stay up late’.
35 There are only four words in the English language
that end in ‘dous’.
They are: hazardous, horrendous, stupendous and tremendous.
34 A scissor was originally a type of Roman gladiator
thought to have been armed either with a pair of swords or blades, or with a single dual-bladed
dagger. 33
The most common adjective in the English language is ‘good’.
The most common noun is ‘time’, and the most common word used in conversation is ‘I’.
32 Bamboozle derives from a French word, embabouiner,
meaning ‘to make a baboon out of someone’.
To metagrobolise someone is to utterly confuse them.
31 In Tudor English, a ‘gandermooner’ was
a man who flirted with other women while his wife recovered from childbirth.
Which actually makes him an asshat.
Which is an alternate way of saying douchebag. 30
A moment is a very brief period of time, or a specific moment in time.
However, in mediaeval Europe, a moment was precisely 1/40th of an hour, or 90 seconds.
29 A zoilist is an unfair or unnecessarily harsh
critic, or someone who particularly enjoys finding fault in things.
Red Symons and Simon Cowell are examples of zoilists.
28 The longest English word with its letters
in reverse alphabetical order is the compound word ‘spoonfeed’.
27 ‘Bookkeeper’ and ‘bookkeeping’ are
the only two unhyphenated words in the English language with three consecutive double letters.
Other such words, like ‘sweet-toothed’, require a hyphen to be readily readable.
26 The word ‘testify’ was derived from a
time when men were required to swear on their testicles.
The practice appears in the bible’s Old Testament.
25 The part of your back that you can't quite
reach to scratch is called the acnestis.
It's derived from the Greek word for ‘cheese-grater.’
But maybe people know it by its alternate name 'that damn spot'.
24 Although an ounce is commonly known as a unit
of weight, it is also a duration of seven and a half seconds.
23 ‘Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia’ is the
proper name for an ice-cream headache.
The term ‘ice-cream headache’ has been in use since at least January 1937.
The first published use of the term ‘brain freeze’, as it pertains to cold-induced
headaches, was in May 1991.
22 Phonology is a branch of linguistics that
deals with systems of sounds in a language.
It is not to be confused with the similar sounding ‘phenology’, which is the study
of seasonal natural phenomena.
21 ‘Typewriter’ is one of the longest common
words you can type on the top row of a typewriter.
Some others include ‘repertoire’, ‘proprietor’ and ‘perpetuity’.
20 The chess term ‘checkmate’ comes from
the 14th Century Arabic phrase, ‘shah mat’, which means ‘the king is helpless’.
19 Hogwash is literally kitchen scraps used to
feed pigs.
The first writer who used it figuratively to mean ‘nonsense’ was Mark Twain.
18 All planets except Earth were named after
Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.
Earth is a 1,000-year-old English–German name that means ‘the ground’.
17 The longest single-syllabled word in the English
language is ‘screeched’.
Similarly, ‘strengths’ is the longest word with just one vowel.
16 The shortest word containing all five main
vowels is ‘eunoia’, meaning ‘beautiful thinking’ or a state of normal mental health.
15 ‘The countryside’ is an anagram of ‘no
city dust here’, while ‘psithurism’ is the sound of the wind rustling through
leaves.
14 Some words evolve over time, causing their
meanings to modify.
The word ‘noon’ originally referred to 3 pm, and scarecrows were once known as ‘hobidy-boobies’.
13 To ‘exulcerate’ someone literally means
to annoy or irritate them as much as an ulcer would.
12 The second least used letter is ‘Q’.
In written English, only one letter in every 510 is a Q.
11 English is an official language in seventy-nine
countries a nd territories.
It is the third most commonly spoken language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.
10 The dot above the letters ‘i’ and ‘j’
is called a superscript dot.
Colloquially, it is also called a tittle. 9
Dermatoglyphics is the study of fingerprints and skin patterns.
It is also the longest English word comprised entirely of different letters.
8 The opposite of déjà-vu is jamais-vu.
It is the unnerving feeling that something very familiar is completely new.
7 The first letters of the months separating
June and December spell ‘JASON’. 6
The adjectival form of abracadabra is ‘abracadabrant’.
It is used to describe something marvellous, dazzlingly impressive, or anything that has
apparently happened by magic.
5 Swear words were nicknamed ‘tongue-worms’
in the 1600s.
Swear words are also processed in a separate part of the brain from regular speech and
are thought to reduce stress.
4 English is the official language of the skies.
All pilots on international flights must identify themselves in English regardless of their
country of origin.
3 ‘Famgrasping’ is when you shake hands
with someone in an agreement or to make up a difference.
‘Fam’ corresponds with the word hand.
2 ‘E’ is the most commonly used letter in
the alphabet.
It comprises eleven percent of the entire English language.
1 The Oxford English Dictionary was first published
in ten volumes.
It took seventy years to complete and was the first massively crowd-sourced collation
of English knowledge.
It contains 615,000 entries.