Fascinating Facts about the English Language

•	‘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.
•	‘I am.’ is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
•	‘Subdermatoglyphic’ is the longest English word that can be written without repeating any letters. It has 17 letters in it, and it’s the medical name for the layer of skin beneath the fingertips. Slightly easier to guess the meaning of is the word ‘uncopyrightable’, which has 15 letters without any being repeated, and refers to something that can’t be copyrighted or owned.
•	‘The sun is over the foreyard’ is an old naval expression meaning ‘it’s time for a drink’.
•	‘E’ is the most commonly used letter in the alphabet. It comprises eleven percent of the entire English language.
•	‘Famgrasping’ is when you shake hands with someone in an agreement or to make up a difference. ‘Fam’ corresponds with the word hand.
•	‘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.
•	‘Pronunciation’ is the word which is most mispronounced in the English language!
•	‘psithurism’ is the sound of the wind rustling through leaves.
•	‘Queueing’ is the only word with five consecutive vowels (five vowels in a row). This is a great word to use when you play hangman!
•	‘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 diarrhea’.
•	‘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.
•	‘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.
•	‘The countryside’ is an anagram of ‘no city dust here’.
•	‘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’.
•	“Bookkeeper” is the only word in English language with three consecutive Double letters.
•	“Go!” is the shortest grammatically correct sentence in English.
•	1/4 of the world’s population speaks at least some English.
•	11% of the entire English language is just the letter E.
•	90% of English text consists of just 1000 words.
•	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.
•	A “moment” originally meant “1/40th of an hour.”  Back when people used sundials to tell time, the day was divided into solar hours based on the position of the dial. Solar hours were in turn divided into four puncta (quarter-hours), ten minuta and 40 momenta. The actual length of a moment varied depending on the hour, but it was approximately 90 seconds.
•	A batrachomyomachy is a petty, pointless argument or quibble.
•	A belter-werrits is a teasing or annoying child.
•	A callomaniac is someone who thinks they’re more beautiful than they actually are.
•	A compulsive desire to look at something that horrifies you — like a horror film or an injury — is called cacospectomania.
•	A crockan is a piece of food that has shrivelled up and burned in cooking.
•	A cumberground is an utterly useless person who literally serves no other purpose than to take up space.
•	A doryphore is a pestering person who draws attention to other people’s errors.
•	A Dutch feast is one at which the host gets drunk before his hosts do.
•	A giraffe’s horns are properly called ossicones.
•	A group of dragonflies is called a dazzle.
•	A group of kittens is called a kindle.
•	A growlery is a place you like to retire to when you’re unwell or in a bad mood. It was coined by Charles Dickens in Bleak House (1853).
•	A heautoscopy is a dream or hallucination in which a person imagines seeing their own body from a distance.
•	A hecatompedon is a building measuring precisely 100ft × 100ft.
•	A lampus is an awkward and clumsy fall, part way through which you try to grab onto something to try and stop from falling.
•	A little heap is called a hipple.
•	A lot of words that you think of as “English” were actually borrowed from other languages.  For example, “I” and “we” may be among the oldest English words, but “they,” “their” and “them” come from the Old Norse “þeir.” The original English pronouns were hie, hire and heora. Other common borrowed words include “leg” (from the Old Norse leggr), “skin” (also from Old Norse), and “person” (the Old French persone).
•	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.
•	A monepic sentence is one that contains a single word.
•	A myriad is literally 10,000 of something.
•	A nephew was originally a grandson.
•	A new word is added to the dictionary every two hours, about 4,000 each year. The newest and strangest include ‘nerdjacking’ (to hijack a conversation with detailed explanations), ‘undorse’ (to reverse a policy) and ‘Mx’ (a gender-neutral form of address instead of using Mr or Ms).
•	A pangram sentence is one that contains every letter in the language.  For example, the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a pangram.
•	A percontation is a question that requires more than a straightforward “yes” or “no” answer.
•	A period of five years is called a lustre.
•	A person’s headmark comprises all of the facial features and characteristics that make them recognizable as themselves.
•	A preposition is always followed by a noun (ie noun, proper noun, pronoun, noun group, gerund).
•	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.
•	A puckfist is someone who braggingly dominates a conversation.
•	A punchclod is someone who works a lowly or difficult, manual job.
•	A repdigit is a number comprised of a series of repeated numbers, like 9,999.
•	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.
•	A shape with 99 sides would be called an enneacontakaienneagon.
•	A slawterpooch is a lazy or ungainly person.
•	A toot-moot is a conversation carried out entirely in whispers.
•	A wag-feather is a cocky, swaggering young man.
•	A willingness to entertain strangers is called xenodochy.
•	A wonder-horn is a collection of amazing things.
•	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.
•	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.
•	abature is the trail of trampled grass an animal leaves behind it
•	abligurition (spending too much money on food and drink — worth remembering that one in the run up to Christmas)
•	Acronyms are said like words, while initialisms are individual letters. For example, NATO is an acronym and FBI is an initialism. – Source
•	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’.
•	All the food you take on a picnic is called the picnickery.
•	Almost is one of the longest English words to have all its letters in alphabetical order.
•	Although an ounce is commonly known as a unit of weight, it is also a duration of seven and a half seconds.
•	Amplexation is a 17th century word for embracing someone.
•	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’.
•	An adoxography is a fine work of writing on a pointless or trivial subject.
•	An anepronym is a trade name that has come to be used generally in the language, like Kleenex, Jacuzzi or hoover.
•	An aquabib is someone who chooses to drink water rather than alcohol.
•	An autohagiography is an autobiography that makes the subject appear better than they actually are.
•	An autological word is one that describes itself — like short or unhyphenated.
•	An orchestromaniac is someone who can’t help but dance.
•	Anything described as hippocrepiform is shaped like a horseshoe.
•	Anything described as transpontine is located on the opposite side of a bridge.
•	Aquabob is an old name for an icicle.
•	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’.
•	As a verb rather than a noun, owl means “to act wisely, despite knowing nothing.”
•	As a verb, tiger means “to paint something in stripes of contrasting colors.”
•	Aspirin and heroin were both originally trademarks. They lost their trademark status as part of the Treaty of Versailles.
•	Bamboozle derives from a French word, embabouiner, meaning ‘to make a baboon out of someone’.
•	Because of the pattern of holes they make in the ground, gophers take their name from an old French word for honeycomb.
•	Before the English speaking world was exposed to the fruit, the color orange was referred to as “geoluhread” which is Old English for red-yellow. – Source
•	Bumblebees were nicknamed foggy-toddlers in 18th century England.
•	Bung was Victorian slang for a teapot. A Bohemian bungery was a bar frequented by struggling writers and musicians.
•	Bystanders were originally called stander-bys.
•	Chameleon literally means “dwarf lion.”
•	Champagne literally means “open country.”
•	CHECKBOOK is the longest horizontally symmetrical word in the English language — although if proper nouns are included, Florida’s Lake Okeechobee is one letter longer.
•	Cluck-and-grunt was 1930s slang for ham and eggs.
•	Conversation is an anagram of “voices rant on.”
•	Counting on your fingers is properly called dactylonymy.
•	Cowards have been called chickens since the 14th century.
•	Dermatoglyphics is the study of fingerprints and skin patterns. It is also the longest English word comprised entirely of different letters.
•	Did you know that enneacontakaienneagon is actually a word in the English language? (And you thought pronouncing supercalifragilisticexpialidocious was difficult?). In fact, the meaning of the word is just as bizarre as the word itself: it’s a shape with ninety-nine sides.
•	Do you know what is special about the following sentence? ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’. This type of sentence is called a ‘pangram’ as it uses every letter in the English language.
•	Dogfish are so-called because they were once thought to hunt in packs.
•	Drumbledrane is an old English word for a little bumblebee.
•	Dutch pink is a shade of yellow.
•	Earth is the only planet in our solar system that's not named after a god.  The others are Mars, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn and Neptune (Pluto RIP).
•	English actually originates from what is now called north west Germany and the Netherlands.
•	English is an official language in seventy-nine countries and territories. It is the third most commonly spoken language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.
•	English is mainly a mix of Old High German, Old Norse, and Anglo-Norman. We only started speaking recognisable Modern English in the 14th Century.
•	English is the language of the air.  This means that all pilots have to identify themselves and speak in English while flying, regardless of their origin.
•	English is the official language of 67 countries.
•	English is the official language of the skies. All pilots on international flights must identify themselves in English regardless of their country of origin.
•	English is the third most commonly spoken language in the world (the first and second are Mandarin Chinese and Spanish).
•	English originates from Old English, which is its earliest historical form from the 5th century. There was no punctuation until the 15th century. The oldest Old English word still used today that has the same direct meaning is ‘town’. Town has kept the same meaning as its original Old English word “tun” meaning area of dwelling.
•	English words for livestock (cow, sheep, chicken) are Germanic-based and the words for meats (beef, mutton, poultry) are French-based. This is because the people who raised the animals were Anglo-Saxon peasants and the people who ate them were Norman aristocrats. – Source
•	Essence-peddler was a 19th century nickname for a skunk.
•	Etymologically, Great Britain means ‘great land of the tattooed’.
•	Euthymy is a 17th century word for total tranquillity and peace of mind.
•	Every syllable in English must have a vowel (sound). Not all syllables have consonants.
•	Flabellation is the use of a fan to cool something down.
•	For example, consider the word “morse,” originally a typo in certain editions of Sir Walter Scott’s “The Monastery.  According to Professor Walter William Skeat, who presided over the Philological Society in 1886, the word:  "[O]ccurs in a misprint of a passage of one of Scott‘s novels, but here there is the further amusing circumstance that the etymology of the false word was settled to the satisfaction of some of the readers."  In the majority of editions of The Monastery, we read: "… dost thou so soon morse thoughts of slaughter?"
•	Funk was originally a Tudor word for the stale smell of tobacco smoke.
•	Gangelwæfre is an Old English word for a spider. It literally means ‘walking-weaver’.
•	GIF stands for “graphics interchange format.” According to its inventor, it should be pronounced “jiff” not “giff.”
•	Girl used to mean small boy or girl.  The word “girl” was not initially used to refer to a specific gender. It used to mean “child” or “young person” regardless of the gender.
•	Gloffin is an old Scots English word for a short, disturbed sleep.
•	Go on, try to say it! Luckily, this isn’t a word you are likely to need any time soon – or, at least, we hope not. It’s the proper name for a lung disease that you get by inhaling too much ash and coal dust. It’s a very nasty illness that used to affect lots of coal miners in the past.
•	Goostrumnoodle is a Cornish dialect word for a fool.
•	Happy is used three times more often in English than sad.
•	Hexagons were once called sexangles.
•	Hogwash is literally kitchen scraps used to feed pigs. The first writer who used it figuratively to mean ‘nonsense’ was Mark Twain.
•	Hoozy-poozy is an 18th century word for anything idly done just to pass the time.
•	Hypengophobia is the hatred of having responsibilities.
•	I is the oldest word in the English language.
•	If something is obliviable then it’s able to be forgotten.
•	If something is xyresic then it’s razor sharp.
•	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."
•	If You Turn the Word “SWIM” upside down, it still says SWIM!
•	If you write any number in words (English), count the number of letters, write this new number in words and so on, you’ll always end with number 4. – Source
•	If you wrote out every number in the standard English counting system (one, two, three, four) in alphabetical order, no matter how high you counted the first number would always be eight.  The second would always be eight billion.
•	In Tudor English, ducks were nicknamed arsefeet because their legs are so far back on their bodies.
•	The newest English words were added to the Miriam-Webster Dictionary just yesterday.  They include: TMI- too much information,      FOMO: Fear of missing out,    Hella: “a lot of” something. They’re about 10 years late on this one.    Dox: to publicly identify or publish private information about [someone] especially as a form of punishment or revenge.
•	The oldest words in English are thousands of years old.  They include personal pronouns and numbers: I, We, Two, and Three.
•	To metagrobolise someone is to utterly confuse them.
•	Your tongueshot is the distance within which you can be heard.
•	zenzizenzizenzic (a 16th century word for a number raised to its eighth power)
•	zwischenzug (a purely tactical move made to buy time).
•	If you’re an English speaker, roughly 6% of all the language you’ll ever use will be just the word the.
•	In 16th century English, a carpet-monger was a womanizing man.
•	In 16th century English, twirk (spelled with an E, not an I) meant “to twist the hairs of a moustache.”
•	In 18th century English, a cockmedainty was an overly prim or fastidious person.
•	In 18th century English, a wobble-shop was a place where beer was sold without a license.
•	In 18th century slang, “to play booty” meant “to play a game with the intention of losing.”
•	In 18th century slang, a heathen philosopher was someone whose underwear could be seen through his trouser pockets.
•	In 18th century slang, a waffle-frolic was a sumptuous meal or feast.
•	In 1920s slang, a wagger-pagger-bagger was a wastepaper basket.
•	In 1930s slang, artillery was any food that caused gas.
•	In 19th century English, a cover-slut was a long cloak or overcoat worn to hide a person’s untidy or dirty clothes underneath.
•	In addition to the word “lord” evolving from a word literally meaning “keeper of bread”, “lady” evolved from a word literally meaning “kneader of bread.” – Source
•	In Elizabethan English, a clap of thunder was nicknamed a rounce-robble-hobble.
•	In Elizabethan slang, tailors were nicknamed snip-snappers.
•	In English, multiple adjectives are supposed to be listed in the following order: Quantity, Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material and Purpose. – Source
•	In English, the @ symbol is usually called "the at sign" or "the at symbol".
•	In fact, on average, one in every eight letters you see written down will be an “e”.
•	In its earliest known written record, the English alphabet had 29 letters.
•	In mediaeval Europe, a moment was precisely 1/40th of an hour, or 90 seconds.
•	In modern English, the word “girl” is always used to mean a female child (or young woman), and the word “man” always means a male adult. It wasn’t always that way, though. Until the 1300s, “girl” just meant a young child – that could mean a girl or a boy. The word “man” just meant a person.
•	If you’re imberbic then you don’t have a beard.
•	In normal usage, the # symbol has several names, for example: hash, pound sign, number sign.
•	In Old English, arselings meant “heading in a backward direction.”
•	In Old English, bad weather was called unweather.
•	In the 16th and 17th century, buttock-mail was the name of a tax once levied in Scotland on people who had sex out of wedlock.
•	In the 17th century, magpies were nicknamed pie-maggots.
•	In the 18th century, a clank-napper was a thief who specialized in stealing silverware.
•	In the 18th century, teachers were nicknamed “haberdashers of pronouns.”
•	In the early days of Hollywood, the custard pies thrown in comedy sketches were nicknamed magoos.
•	In Tudor English, a ‘gandermooner’ was a man who flirted with other women while his wife recovered from childbirth.
•	In Tudor English, a gandermooner was a man who flirted with other women while his wife recovered from childbirth.
•	In Victorian slang, a flapdoodler was an annoyingly boastful or self-righteous person.
•	In Victorian slang, a masterpiece of nightwork was a strikingly handsome criminal.
•	In Victorian slang, a polly-in-the-cottage was a man who enjoyed doing housework.
•	In Victorian slang, muffin-wallopers were old unmarried or widowed women who would meet up to gossip over tea and cakes.
•	In written English, only one letter in every 510 is a Q.
•	English is the only major language that doesn’t have any organization guiding it - as opposed to the French Académie française, the Spanish Real Academia Española and the German Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung. These organizations are responsible for controlling the evolution of their respective language in terms of usage, vocabulary, and grammar.
•	It’s hard to believe, but if you wrote out every single number in order, you wouldn’t use the letter “b” until you reached the word “billion”. There isn’t a single “b” in the first 2,999,999,999,999 numbers in English!
•	Jottle is an old Scots English word meaning ‘to achieve nothing despite looking busy’.
•	Juke as in "jukebox" may be derived from a West African word for "disorderly" or a Scots word for "dance". No one really knows.
•	Many English words have changed their meaning over time - for example, ‘awful’ used to mean ‘inspiring wonder’ and was a short version of ‘full of awe’, whereas ‘nice’ used to mean ‘silly’
•	Many English words used to be spelled phonetically (e.g. debt was ‘det’) until some scholars purposely added silent letters to make them look more like Greek or Latin words, sometimes erroneously. – Source
•	Many people believe that the word "testify" originated in Roman times, when men swore on their testicles. Unfortunately this is not true.
•	Mediocre literally means “halfway up a mountain.”
•	Mochas are named after a port in Yemen, from where coffee was exported to Europe in the 18th century.
•	Monkey-poop is an old naval slang word for a smaller-than-normal poop deck.
•	More English words begin with the letter ‘S’ than any other letter of the alphabet.
•	Most English grammar and spelling follow the standardised rules set out in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, which was published in 1755.
•	No wonder it’s such a weird (and fascinating!) language. Old English first came into use way back in the 5th Century AD. Back then, it was a mixture of German dialects with some very old Celtic words, as well as other words that came from Latin. Since then the language has come on a very long journey to evolve into the modern English you hear today!
•	Noon is derived from the Latin for “ninth,” novem. It originally referred to the ninth hour of the Roman day — 3pm.
•	Oysterhood means “reclusiveness,” or “an overwhelming desire to stay at home.”
•	Posing a question for rhetorical effect and then answering it yourself is called anthypophora.
•	Nucleus derives from the Latin word for the kernel of a nut.
•	Of the 5,000 commonest words in the English language, only zone begins with a Z.
•	Old English used the word ‘dore’ for male bees. Dumbledore means bumblebee.
•	On average, for every letter Q used in written English there will be 56 E’s.
•	Over 80% of the information stored on computers worldwide is in English.
•	Pentagons were once called quinquangles.
•	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.
•	Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the Longest Word in the English Dictionary, and means a pneumoconiosis caused by the inhalation of very fine silicate or quartz dust
•	Porpoise literally means “pork-fish.”
•	Right now, there are only three words in English that end in -gry:  Hungry, Angry, Hangry- Yes, it’s a “real” word now. It was added to the Oxford online dictionary last year.
•	Samuel Johnson defined a sock as “something put between the foot and the shoe.”
•	Samuel Johnson left the letter X out of his dictionary, claiming that X “begins no word in the English language.”
•	Saturday wit was Tudor slang for dirty jokes.
•	Scarecrows were once known as hobidy-boobies.
•	Schoolmaster is an anagram of “the classroom.”
•	Sea-legs is the ability to walk around a ship in rough seas. Land-legs is the ability to walk on dry land afterwards.
•	Sermocination is the proper name for posing a question and then immediately answering it yourself.
•	Shakespeare, he added a lot of words to the English language.  Some sources say 1,700. Other sources say not so much. But he did coin quite a few words and phrases that are still in use today. Some of his (probable) contributions include:  Gloomy, Lonely, Fashionable, Jaded, Watchdog, birthplace, blushing, undress, torture, bubble and lackluster.
•	Shakespeare used the word housekeeper to mean ‘guard dog’.
•	Shakespeare used the word puking in As You Like It.
•	Shit is one of our oldest words, and used to mean "cattle diarrhoea".   The word has its roots in Germanic and Scandinavian languages, and we've been saying it since at least 1086. Skidbrooke in Lincolnshire and Sherbourn Lane in London were both originally named for being "shit streams".
•	Since 2001, English has been the official language of all international air travel, regardless of the nationality of the pilots.
•	So-called because St. Anthony was the patron saint of swineherds, a St. Anthony pig is a mindless follower or fanatic, or a sponging companion.
•	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’.
•	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").
•	Straitjackets were originally called strait-waistcoats.
•	Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (*breath*) is NOT the longest word in English.  This extra long word (that approximately means “fantastic”) was popularized by the movie Mary Poppins and was eventually added to the dictionary. What you probably didn’t know is that there is a word that is longer—yes longer—than this one. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is a type of lung disease caused by inhaling ash and dust. Go ahead and try pronouncing that!
•	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.
•	Swims will be swims even when turned upside down.  Such words are called ambigrams.
•	Talking in code is called cryptolalia.
•	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.
•	The “pep” of pep talk is an abbreviation of “pepper.”
•	The “skate” of cheapskate is an old American dialect word for a worn-out horse.
•	The “wherefore” of Shakespeare’s “wherefore are thou, Romeo?” means “why” not “where.”
•	The “wuther” of Wuthering Heights is an old English dialect word for a sudden and strong gust of wind.
•	The adjectival form of abracadabra is ‘abracadabrant’. It is used to describe something marvellous, dazzlingly impressive, or anything that has apparently happened by magic.
•	The amount you can hold in your hands when you cup them together like a bowl is called the yepsen.
•	The bowl formed by cupping your hands together is called a gowpen.
•	The burnt or used part of a candlewick is called the snaste.
•	The chess term "checkmate" comes from a 14th century Arabic phrase, "shah mat", which means "the king is helpless".
•	The closest languages to English are Dutch and West Flemish.
•	The creases in the skin on the inside of your wrists are called the rasceta.
•	The distance between your thumb and the opposite side of your hand when it’s extended is called the shaftment.
•	The dot above the letters ‘i’ and ‘j’ is called a superscript dot. Colloquially, it is also called a tittle.
•	The earliest known reference to baseball in English comes from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1798).
•	The earliest record of the phrase “do-it-yourself” comes from a 1910 magazine article about students at Boston University being left to teach themselves.
•	The earliest written record of a rollercoaster in English comes from an 1883 article in The Chicago Tribune. It was described as “a curious structure.”
•	The English language contains a lot of contronyms - words that can have contradictory meanings depending on context. You can read a list here!
•	The English Language Has Been Developing for More Than 1,400 Years
•	The English language is said to be one of the happiest languages in the world - oh, and the word ‘happy’ is used 3 times more often than the word ‘sad’!
•	The English word ‘infant’ comes from the Latin word ‘infans’, meaning “unable to speak” or “speechless.” – Source
•	The English words moose, opossum, pecan, raccoon, skunk, and squash all originated from the now-extinct language of the Algonquian people, the native tribe inhabiting the site of the earliest English colony in what is now the US at Roanoke Island. – Source
•	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.
•	The expressions “bully pulpit” and “lunatic fringe” were coined by Theodore Roosevelt.
•	The feeling of calmness or contentedness that follows a pleasant dream is called euneirophrenia.
•	The first English dictionary was written in 1755.
•	The first letters of the months separating June and December spell 'JASON'.  July, August, September, October, November.
•	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.
•	The following sentence contains seven different spellings of the sound “ee”: ‘He believed Caesar could see people seizing the seas’.
•	The following sentence contains seven 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.)   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.
•	The game of marbles gave us the phrase "knuckle down" (placing your knuckles on the floor lined up a better shot).
•	The head of an asparagus is called the squib.
•	The human tendency to see faces and other images where none actually exists is called pareidolia.
•	The infinity sign, 8, is called a lemniscate. Its name means “decorated with ribbons” in Latin.
•	The Kelvin temperature scale, the forsythia plant, Boeing aircraft and the state of Pennsylvania are all named after people called William.
•	The legendary playwright was responsible for many of the things we say and write today. These include the words ‘fashionable’, ‘advertising’ and ‘laughable’, and the phrase ‘fight fire with fire’, which means to respond to attack with a similar form of attack.
•	The letters “ough” can be pronounced 9 different ways.  Find them all in this sentence: “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 that can be spelled without repeating any letters is ‘uncopyrightable’.
•	The longest English word with its letters in reverse alphabetical order is the compound word ‘spoonfeed’.
•	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’.
•	The longest single-syllabled word in the English language is ‘screeched’. Similarly, ‘strengths’ is the longest word with just one vowel.
•	The longest word in English has 45 letters: ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’! It is a type of lung disease caused by inhaling ash and sand dust.
•	The longest word in English with its letters in alphabetical order is ‘aegilops’, which is a type of plant.
•	The longest word in the English language is neither “antidisestablishmentarianism” nor “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”  The longest word in a major dictionary is “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,” which a lengthy way of describing the lung disease “silicosis.” Silicosis is caused by inhaling fine sand and ash dust, which irritates the lungs and causes scarring.
•	The loose feathers that fall out of cushions and pillows are the culf.
•	The Mayan god of wind and storms was called Jun Raqan, pronounced “Huracan”, hence the English word “Hurricane.” – Source
•	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’.
•	The most common adjective used in English is ‘good’.
•	The most common consonant in English is "r", followed by "t".
•	The most common vowel in English is "e", followed by "a".
•	The most commonly used noun is ‘time’.
•	The most difficult tongue twister in the English language is “sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick”. Why not try it out on your friends and see if any of them can say it without making a mistake?
•	The name rum is a shortened form of rumbullion.
•	The old Irish-English expression “to speak drugget” meant “to speak well, but occasionally slip back into your local accent.”
•	The old Scots word growk means “the determined look a child gives to something she or he really wants.”
•	The oldest English word that is still in use is ‘town’.
•	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.
•	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" :)
•	The opposite of “postpone” is prepone, meaning “to bring something forward in time.”
•	The opposite of déjà-vu is jamais-vu. It is the unnerving feeling that something very familiar is completely new.
•	The opposite of serendipity is zemblanity.
•	The original name for butterfly was flutterby.
•	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.
•	The paddywhack mentioned in the nursery rhyme “This Old Man” is a Victorian slang word for a severe beating.
•	The paddy-whack mentioned in the nursery rhyme “This Old Man” is a Victorian word for a severe beating.
•	The paragraph symbol ¶ is properly called a pilcrow.
•	The part of a wall between two windows is called the interfenestration.
•	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.’
•	The past tense of ‘dare’ is ‘durst’.   However, the word is archaic and no longer widely used.
•	The phrase “long time no see” is believed to be a literal translation of a Native American or Chinese phrase as it is not grammatically correct.
•	The plant nasturtium took its name from a Latin word meaning “twisted nose.”
•	The proper name for cutting your own hair is self-tonsorialism. ‘Tonsorialist’ is an old-world word that encompasses several professions, including barber.
•	The proper name for speaking through clenched teeth is dentiloquy.
•	The proper name for taking your shoes off is discalceation.
•	The quick- of ‘quicksilver’ literally means ‘living’.
•	The second least used letter is ‘Q’. In written English, only one letter in every 510 is a Q.
•	The sentence “this sentence contains thirty-six letters” contains 36 letters.
•	The shortest complete sentence in English is the following. "I am."
•	The shortest -ology is oology, the scientific study of eggs.
•	The shortest word containing all five main vowels is ‘eunoia’, meaning ‘beautiful thinking’ or a state of normal mental health.
•	The shortest, oldest, and most commonly used word is “I.”  Medieval manuscripts reveal that some of the oldest words in English are “I,” “we,” “two,” and “three.” This makes “I” one of the shortest and oldest words in the English language. It is also the most commonly used word in English conversations.
•	The two most common words in English are I and you.
•	The US doesn’t have an official language.
•	The word "alphabet" comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, beta.
•	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.
•	The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat" meaning "the king is helpless".
•	The word "triskaidekaphobia" means "extreme fear of the number 13". This superstition is related to "paraskevidekatriaphobia", which means "fear of Friday the 13th".
•	The word "uncopyrightable" is the longest English word in normal use that contains no letter more than once.
•	The word ‘Goodbye’ originally comes from an Old English phrase meaning ‘god be with you’.
•	The word ‘lol’ was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011.
•	The word ‘set’ has the highest number of definitions.
•	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.
•	The word “Aibohphobia” meaning “fear of palindromes”, is a joke word deliberately constructed to be one. – Source
•	The word “barbecue” has been around since 1650, and it has meant “outdoor meal of roasted meat or fish as a social entertainment” since 1733. – Source
•	The word “camel” in “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” may be an incorrect translation of the word for rope. – Source
•	The word “dude” was first used in the late 1800s as an insult towards young men who were overly concerned with keeping up with the latest fashions. – Source
•	The word “electrocute” is a combination of the words electro and execute, meaning killed by electricity. So if you don’t die, you were not electrocuted, you were shocked. – Source
•	The word “legend” originally meant “things to be read.” In the pre-Medieval period, reading and writing were very rare, and so anything worthy of being written down was something very noteworthy, and thus “legendary”; worthy of being written down and read. – Source
•	The word “liberal” in liberal arts means worthy of a free person (as opposed to a slave), and such an education isn’t meant to get you a job but rather to make you useful in a free society.
•	The word “minute” comes from “the first MINUTE (small) division of an hour.” The word “Second” comes from “the SECOND minute division of an hour.” – Source
•	The word “retarded” came into popular use during the 1960’s because it was considered far less offensive and more politically correct than labeling someone a m*ron, idiot or imbecile. – Source
•	The word “set” has 464 definitions, making it the word with the most variety. – Source
•	The word cereal comes from the Roman goddess Ceres, and her association with edible grains. – Source
•	The word comet comes from a Greek word meaning “long-haired star.”
•	The word creosote literally means “flesh-preserver.”
•	The word sheepish is a palindrome in Morse Code.
•	The word trampoline derives from an Italian word for a pair of stilts.
•	The Words “Girl” and “Man” Didn’t Used to Have a Gender
•	The words a, and, be, have, he, I, in, of, that, the and to make up 25% of all written English.
•	There are “ghost words” that mean nothing.  Believe it or not, there are some words that appeared in the dictionary because of printing errors. The nonexistent word “dord” appeared in the dictionary for eight years in the mid-20th century. It became known as a “ghost word.”  Other “ghost words” have included “kimes,” a misprint of “knives,” and “dord,” a totally made up word that haunted Webster’s Dictionary for 5 years before being caught and exorcised.
•	There are 24 different dialects of English in the US.
•	There are nine different ways to pronounce ‘ough’ in English. This sentence contains all of them:  ‘A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.’ You can search for these words on the Cambridge Dictionary website to listen to their pronunciation. 
•	There are no words in English that rhyme perfectly with ‘month’, ‘orange’, ‘silver’ or ‘purple’. The definition of a ‘perfect rhyme’ can be found here.
•	There are only four words in the English language that end in ‘dous’. They are: hazardous, horrendous, stupendous and tremendous.
•	There are seven ways to spell the sound ‘ee’ in English. This sentence contains all of them: ‘He believed Caesar could see people seizing the seas’.
•	There is a word that is the opposite of sparkle and it is “darkle.”
•	There is no word in the English language that rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple.
•	There is Only One Word in English With 5 Vowels in a Row
•	There was no word for the color orange in English until about 450 years ago.
•	There’s a name for words that we repeat often.  Words we always use even though they add no meaning or value to a sentence are called crutch words. For example, in the sentence “Then I was like, OMG, then like, he went there, and like…” it is pretty obvious that “like” is the crutch word. “Actually,” “honestly,” and “basically” are also commonly used as crutch words.
•	This word is nothing but a misprint of nurse; but in Notes and Queries two independent correspondents accounted for the word morse etymologically. One explained it as to prime, as when one primes a musket, from O. Fr. amorce, powder for the touchhole (Cotgrave), and the other by to bite (Lat. mordere), hence “to indulge in biting, stinging or gnawing thoughts of slaughter”. The latter writes: “That the word as a misprint should have been printed and read by millions for fifty years without being challenged and altered exceeds the bounds of probability.” Yet when the original manuscript of Sir Walter Scott was consulted, it was found that the word was there plainly written nurse.
•	Thrimble is an old Yorkshire word meaning ‘to toy with something in your fingers that you’re reluctant to part with’.
•	To ‘exulcerate’ someone literally means to annoy or irritate them as much as an ulcer would.
•	To battologize means “to repeat a word so incessantly in conversation that it loses all meaning and impact.”
•	To be peneomnipotent is to be almost, but not quite, all-powerful.
•	To calamistrate is to curl your hair.
•	To dismantle originally meant “to remove a cloak.”
•	To explode originally meant “to jeer a performer off the stage.”
•	To frowst is to keep yourself warm in cold weather.
•	To glocidate is to cluck like a hen
•	To hanvayge is to wait around for someone to turn up...
•	To honeyfuggle someone is to trick or deceive them.
•	To jakes is to walk mud into a house.
•	To jirble means “to spill a liquid while pouring it because your hands are shaking.”
•	To metagrobolize someone is to utterly confuse them.
•	To moonstomp is to dance heavy-footedly...
•	To obnunciate is to announce bad news.
•	To puppilate is to scream like a peacock.
•	To quomodocunquize means “to make money by whatever means possible.”
•	To rammack something is to turn it upside down while searching for something else.
•	To snirtle is to try to suppress a laugh.
•	To unhappen something means to make it look like it never took place.
•	Toucans used to be called egg-suckers.
•	Trinkgeld is money meant only to be spent on drink.
•	Turning down or pretending not to be interested in something that you really want is called accismus.
•	Typewriter is one of the longest common words you can type on the top row of a typewriter.  The others include "proprietor", "repertoire", and "perpetuity".
•	Understanding English actually hurts professional players of English scrabble. Some of the world’s best Scrabble players are Thai and can’t speak English. – Source
•	Use of the word selfie increased by 17000% between 2012-13.
•	Using too many words to explain an otherwise straightforward point is called macrology.
•	Velociraptor literally means “swift thief.”
•	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.
•	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.’
•	We use the words ‘you’ and ‘me’ all the time, but which of the two do you think is the most widely used? You might be surprised to learn that while ‘you’ is the 18th most commonly used word in the English language; ‘me’ is way back at number 50. So what is the most used English word? Exactly that: ‘the’.
•	What is known as British accent came to use in and around London around the time of the American Revolution.
•	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.
•	Whipper-tooties are pointless misgivings or groundless excuses for not trying to do something.
•	Witzelsucht is a rare neurological disorder whose sufferers have an excessive tendency to tell pointless stories or inappropriate jokes and puns.
•	Words that are used to fill in time when speaking, such as ‘like’ or ‘basically’, are called crutch words (and should best be avoided!)
•	Xenoglossy is the apparent ability to speak a language that you’ve never actually learned.
•	You can use the girl’s name Rebecca as a verb meaning “to destroy a gate.”
•	You may know a ‘twerk’ to be a popular, thrusting dance but in the 16th century ‘twirk’ (spelt with an ‘i’ not an ‘e’) meant ‘to twist the hairs of a moustache’. 
•	You probably already know that the world “orange” doesn’t rhyme with any other words in the English language, but it’s not the only one. There are no words that rhyme with any of these words, either: silver, purple, month, ninth, pint, wolf, opus, dangerous, marathon, discombobulate.
•	Did you know that enneacontakaienneagon is actually a word in the English language? (And you thought pronouncing supercalifragilisticexpialidocious was difficult?). In fact, the meaning of the word is just as bizarre as the word itself: it’s a shape with ninety-nine sides.
•	“I am” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
•	A pangram sentence is one that contains every letter in the language.  For example, the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a pangram.
•	Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (*breath*) is NOT the longest word in English.  This extra long word (that approximately means “fantastic”) was popularized by the movie Mary Poppins and was eventually added to the dictionary. What you probably didn’t know is that there is a word that is longer—yes longer—than this one. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is a type of lung disease caused by inhaling ash and dust. Go ahead and try pronouncing that!
•	There are “ghost words” that mean nothing.  Believe it or not, there are some words that appeared in the dictionary because of printing errors. The nonexistent word “dord” appeared in the dictionary for eight years in the mid-20th century. It became known as a “ghost word.”
•	The shortest, oldest, and most commonly used word is “I.”  Medieval manuscripts reveal that some of the oldest words in English are “I,” “we,” “two,” and “three.” This makes “I” one of the shortest and oldest words in the English language. It is also the most commonly used word in English conversations.
•	A new word is added to the dictionary every two hours.  Between now and your next meal, a new word will be put into the dictionary. During the course of the year, almost 4,000 new words are added! So, the next time you try to catch the attention of the dissertation committee, try adding some new words to your project.
•	There’s a name for words that we repeat often.  Words we always use even though they add no meaning or value to a sentence are called crutch words. For example, in the sentence “Then I was like, OMG, then like, he went there, and like…” it is pretty obvious that “like” is the crutch word. “Actually,” “honestly,” and “basically” are also commonly used as crutch words.
•	Swims will be swims even when turned upside down.  Such words are called ambigrams.
•	English is the language of the air.  This means that all pilots have to identify themselves and speak in English while flying, regardless of their origin.
•	Girl used to mean small boy or girl.  The word “girl” was not initially used to refer to a specific gender. It used to mean “child” or “young person” regardless of the gender.
•	In the 17th century, magpies were nicknamed pie-maggots.
•	The part of a wall between two windows is called the interfenestration.
•	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.”
•	A hecatompedon is a building measuring precisely 100ft × 100ft.
•	A growlery is a place you like to retire to when you’re unwell or in a bad mood. It was coined by Charles Dickens in Bleak House (1853).
•	There was no word for the color orange in English until about 450 years ago.
•	The infinity sign, 8, is called a lemniscate. Its name means “decorated with ribbons” in Latin.
•	A Dutch feast is one at which the host gets drunk before his hosts do.
•	Schoolmaster is an anagram of “the classroom.”
•	To explode originally meant “to jeer a performer off the stage.”
•	Funk was originally a Tudor word for the stale smell of tobacco smoke.
•	In written English, only one letter in every 510 is a Q.
•	The opposite of déjà-vu is called jamais-vu: it describes the odd feeling that something very familiar is actually completely new.
•	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.
•	To jirble means “to spill a liquid while pouring it because your hands are shaking.”
•	Samuel Johnson defined a sock as “something put between the foot and the shoe.”
•	In Victorian slang, muffin-wallopers were old unmarried or widowed women who would meet up to gossip over tea and cakes.
•	Scarecrows were once known as hobidy-boobies.
•	The longest English word with its letters in reverse alphabetical order is spoonfeed.
•	Shakespeare used the word puking in As You Like It.
•	Flabellation is the use of a fan to cool something down.
•	Bamboozle derives from a French word, embabouiner, meaning “to make a baboon out of someone.”
•	A percontation is a question that requires more than a straightforward “yes” or “no” answer.
•	The shortest -ology is oology, the scientific study of eggs.
•	As a verb rather than a noun, owl means “to act wisely, despite knowing nothing.”
•	A shape with 99 sides would be called an enneacontakaienneagon.
•	In the 18th century, a clank-napper was a thief who specialized in stealing silverware.
•	Noon is derived from the Latin for “ninth,” novem. It originally referred to the ninth hour of the Roman day — 3pm.
•	11% of the entire English language is just the letter E.
•	Oysterhood means “reclusiveness,” or “an overwhelming desire to stay at home.”
•	A puckfist is someone who braggingly dominates a conversation.
•	The bowl formed by cupping your hands together is called a gowpen.
•	To battologize means “to repeat a word so incessantly in conversation that it loses all meaning and impact.”
•	A zoilist is an unfair or unnecessarily harsh critic, or someone who particularly enjoys finding fault in things.
•	In 19th century English, a cover-slut was a long cloak or overcoat worn to hide a person’s untidy or dirty clothes underneath.
•	Happy is used three times more often in English than sad.
•	Trinkgeld is money meant only to be spent on drink.
•	Aquabob is an old name for an icicle.
•	In the 16th and 17th century, buttock-mail was the name of a tax once levied in Scotland on people who had sex out of wedlock.
•	Witzelsucht is a rare neurological disorder whose sufferers have an excessive tendency to tell pointless stories or inappropriate jokes and puns.
•	A repdigit is a number comprised of a series of repeated numbers, like 9,999.
•	In Tudor English, a gandermooner was a man who flirted with other women while his wife recovered from childbirth.
•	A cumberground is an utterly useless person who literally serves no other purpose than to take up space.
•	Sermocination is the proper name for posing a question and then immediately answering it yourself.
•	The earliest known reference to baseball in English comes from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1798).
•	Whipper-tooties are pointless misgivings or groundless excuses for not trying to do something.
•	Anything described as transpontine is located on the opposite side of a bridge.
•	In the early days of Hollywood, the custard pies thrown in comedy sketches were nicknamed magoos.
•	Checkbook is the longest horizontally symmetrical word in the English language — although if proper nouns are included, Florida’s Lake Okeechobee is one letter longer.
•	The earliest record of the phrase “do-it-yourself” comes from a 1910 magazine article about students at Boston University being left to teach themselves.
•	The paddywhack mentioned in the nursery rhyme “This Old Man” is a Victorian slang word for a severe beating.
•	The Kelvin temperature scale, the forsythia plant, Boeing aircraft and the state of Pennsylvania are all named after people called William.
•	Xenoglossy is the apparent ability to speak a language that you’ve never actually learned.
•	Mochas are named after a port in Yemen, from where coffee was exported to Europe in the 18th century.
•	In mediaeval Europe, a moment was precisely 1/40th of an hour, or 90 seconds.
•	To quomodocunquize means “to make money by whatever means possible.”
•	Porpoise literally means “pork-fish.”
•	Shivviness is an old Yorkshire word for the uncomfortable feeling of wearing new underwear.
•	The adjectival form of abracadabra is abracadabrant, used to describe anything that has apparently happened by magic.
•	Straitjackets were originally called strait-waistcoats.
•	Aspirin and heroin were both originally trademarks. They lost their trademark status as part of the Treaty of Versailles.
•	An autological word is one that describes itself — like short or unhyphenated.
•	In the 18th century, teachers were nicknamed “haberdashers of pronouns.”
•	The burnt or used part of a candlewick is called the snaste.
•	The expressions “bully pulpit” and “lunatic fringe” were coined by Theodore Roosevelt.
•	Speaking of Shakespeare, he added a lot of words to the English language.  Some sources say 1,700. Other sources say not so much. But he did coin quite a few words and phrases that are still in use today. Some of his (probable) contributions include:  Gloomy, Lonely, Fashionable, Jaded, Watchdog, birthplace, blushing, undress, torture, bubble
•	3) The oldest words in English are thousands of years old.  They include personal pronouns and numbers: I, We, Two, and Three.
•	4) The newest English words were added to the Miriam-Webster Dictionary just yesterday.  They include: TMI- too much information,      FOMO: Fear of missing out,    Hella: “a lot of” something. They’re about 10 years late on this one.    Dox: to publicly identify or publish private information about [someone] especially as a form of punishment or revenge.
•	Dictionaries can be haunted.  “Ghost words” are words that were rarely or never used but that somehow end up in a dictionary anyway. They are usually the result of printing errors, either in the dictionary itself or in source material. Once such errors are included in the dictionary, scholars sometimes scramble to justify them.
•	For example, consider the word “morse,” originally a typo in certain editions of Sir Walter Scott’s “The Monastery.  According to Professor Walter William Skeat, who presided over the Philological Society in 1886, the word:  "[O]ccurs in a misprint of a passage of one of Scott‘s novels, but here there is the further amusing circumstance that the etymology of the false word was settled to the satisfaction of some of the readers."  In the majority of editions of The Monastery, we read: "… dost thou so soon morse thoughts of slaughter?"
•	This word is nothing but a misprint of nurse; but in Notes and Queries two independent correspondents accounted for the word morse etymologically. One explained it as to prime, as when one primes a musket, from O. Fr. amorce, powder for the touchhole (Cotgrave), and the other by to bite (Lat. mordere), hence “to indulge in biting, stinging or gnawing thoughts of slaughter”. The latter writes: “That the word as a misprint should have been printed and read by millions for fifty years without being challenged and altered exceeds the bounds of probability.” Yet when the original manuscript of Sir Walter Scott was consulted, it was found that the word was there plainly written nurse.
•	Other “ghost words” have included “kimes,” a misprint of “knives,” and “dord,” a totally made up word that haunted Webster’s Dictionary for 5 years before being caught and exorcised.
•	A lot of words that you think of as “English” were actually borrowed from other languages.  For example, “I” and “we” may be among the oldest English words, but “they,” “their” and “them” come from the Old Norse “þeir.” The original English pronouns were hie, hire and heora. Other common borrowed words include “leg” (from the Old Norse leggr), “skin” (also from Old Norse), and “person” (the Old French persone).
•	A “moment” originally meant “1/40th of an hour.”  Back when people used sundials to tell time, the day was divided into solar hours based on the position of the dial. Solar hours were in turn divided into four puncta (quarter-hours), ten minuta and 40 momenta. The actual length of a moment varied depending on the hour, but it was approximately 90 seconds.
•	The longest word in the English language is neither “antidisestablishmentarianism” nor “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”  The longest word in a major dictionary is “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,” which a lengthy way of describing the lung disease “silicosis.” Silicosis is caused by inhaling fine sand and ash dust, which irritates the lungs and causes scarring.
•	Right now, there are only three words in English that end in -gry:  Hungry, Angry, Hangry- Yes, it’s a “real” word now. It was added to the Oxford online dictionary last year.
•	The letters “ough” can be pronounced 9 different ways.  Find them all in this sentence: “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”
•	English actually originates from what is now called north west Germany and the Netherlands.
•	The phrase “long time no see” is believed to be a literal translation of a Native American or Chinese phrase as it is not grammatically correct.
•	“Go!” is the shortest grammatically correct sentence in English.
•	The original name for butterfly was flutterby.
•	About 4,000 words are added to the dictionary each year.
•	The two most common words in English are I and you.
•	11% of the entire English language is just the letter E.
•	The English language is said to be one of the happiest languages in the world - oh, and the word ‘happy’ is used 3 times more often than the word ‘sad’!
•	1/4 of the world’s population speaks at least some English.
•	The US doesn’t have an official language.
•	It is the only major language that doesn’t have any organization guiding it - as opposed to the French Académie française, the Spanish Real Academia Española and the German Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung. These organizations are responsible for controlling the evolution of their respective language in terms of usage, vocabulary, and grammar.
•	The most common adjective used in English is ‘good’.
•	The most commonly used noun is ‘time’.
•	The word ‘set’ has the highest number of definitions.
•	Month, orange, silver, and purple do not rhyme with any other word.
•	The English language contains a lot of contronyms - words that can have contradictory meanings depending on context. You can read a list here!
•	Over 80% of the information stored on computers worldwide is in English.
•	Words that are used to fill in time when speaking, such as ‘like’ or ‘basically’, are called crutch words (and should best be avoided!)
•	English is the official language of 67 countries.
•	90% of English text consists of just 1000 words.
•	There are 24 different dialects of English in the US.
•	The word ‘lol’ was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011.
•	What is known as British accent came to use in and around London around the time of the American Revolution.
•	The word ‘Goodbye’ originally comes from an Old English phrase meaning ‘god be with you’.
•	Etymologically, Great Britain means ‘great land of the tattooed’.
•	There are seven ways to spell the sound ‘ee’ in English. This sentence contains all of them: ‘He believed Caesar could see people seizing the seas’.
•	Many English words have changed their meaning over time - for example, ‘awful’ used to mean ‘inspiring wonder’ and was a short version of ‘full of awe’, whereas ‘nice’ used to mean ‘silly’
•	The first English dictionary was written in 1755.
•	The oldest English word that is still in use is ‘town’.
•	More English words begin with the letter ‘S’ than any other letter of the alphabet.
•	‘I am.’ is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
•	The longest English word that can be spelled without repeating any letters is ‘uncopyrightable’.
•	The following sentence contains seven different spellings of the sound “ee”: ‘He believed Caesar could see people seizing the seas’.
•	Do you know what is special about the following sentence? ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’. This type of sentence is called a ‘pangram’ as it uses every letter in the English language.
•	The longest word in English has 45 letters: ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’! It is a type of lung disease caused by inhaling ash and sand dust.
•	There is no word in the English language that rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple.
•	‘Queueing’ is the only word with five consecutive vowels (five vowels in a row). This is a great word to use when you play hangman!
•	There are nine different ways to pronounce ‘ough’ in English. This sentence contains all of them:  ‘A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.’ You can search for these words on the Cambridge Dictionary website to listen to their pronunciation. 
•	Due to a printing error, there was a word in the English dictionary from 1932 to 1940 which didn’t have a meaning.  The word was ‘Dord’ and it became known as ‘ghost word’.
•	‘Pronunciation’ is the word which is most mispronounced in the English language!
•	English is the official language of the sky! It doesn’t matter which country they are from, all pilots speak in English on international flights.
•	The most difficult tongue twister in the English language is “sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick”. Why not try it out on your friends and see if any of them can say it without making a mistake?
•	A Pangram is a Sentence that Contains Every Letter in the Alphabet
•	For example, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” contains every single letter in the English language.
•	The Most Common Letter Used in English is “E”
•	In fact, on average, one in every eight letters you see written down will be an “e”.
•	Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the Longest Word in the English Dictionary
•	Go on, try to say it! Luckily, this isn’t a word you are likely to need any time soon – or, at least, we hope not. It’s the proper name for a lung disease that you get by inhaling too much ash and coal dust. It’s a very nasty illness that used to affect lots of coal miners in the past.
•	If You Turn the Word “SWIM” upside down, it still says SWIM!
•	Believe it or not, there’s even a word for words like these. They’re called “ambigrams”.
•	There is Only One Word in English With 5 Vowels in a Row
•	Did you guess what it was? The answer is “queuing”!
•	There Are No “Bs” Until “Billion”
•	It’s hard to believe, but if you wrote out every single number in order, you wouldn’t use the letter “b” until you reached the word “billion”. There isn’t a single “b” in the first 2,999,999,999,999 numbers in English!
•	Some Words Don’t Rhyme With Anything
•	You probably already know that the world “orange” doesn’t rhyme with any other words in the English language, but it’s not the only one. There are no words that rhyme with any of these words, either: silver, purple, month, ninth, pint, wolf, opus, dangerous, marathon, discombobulate.
•	The Words “Girl” and “Man” Didn’t Used to Have a Gender
•	In modern English, the word “girl” is always used to mean a female child (or young woman), and the word “man” always means a male adult. It wasn’t always that way, though. Until the 1300s, “girl” just meant a young child – that could mean a girl or a boy. The word “man” just meant a person.
•	The English Language Has Been Developing for More Than 1,400 Years
•	No wonder it’s such a weird (and fascinating!) language. Old English first came into use way back in the 5th Century AD. Back then, it was a mixture of German dialects with some very old Celtic words, as well as other words that came from Latin. Since then the language has come on a very long journey to evolve into the modern English you hear today!
•	Interesting Facts about English in no particular order...
•	The most common letter in English is "e".
•	The most common vowel in English is "e", followed by "a".
•	The most common consonant in English is "r", followed by "t".
•	Every syllable in English must have a vowel (sound). Not all syllables have consonants.
•	Only two English words in current use end in "-gry". They are "angry" and "hungry".
•	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.
•	The word "triskaidekaphobia" means "extreme fear of the number 13". This superstition is related to "paraskevidekatriaphobia", which means "fear of Friday the 13th".
•	More English words begin with the letter "s" than with any other letter.
•	A preposition is always followed by a noun (ie noun, proper noun, pronoun, noun group, gerund).
•	The word "uncopyrightable" is the longest English word in normal use that contains no letter more than once.
•	A sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet is called a "pangram".
•	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.
•	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" :)
•	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.
•	The word "alphabet" comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, beta.
•	The dot over the letter "i" and the letter "j" is called a "superscript dot".
•	In normal usage, the # symbol has several names, for example: hash, pound sign, number sign.
•	In English, the @ symbol is usually called "the at sign" or "the at symbol".
•	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."
•	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").
•	The shortest complete sentence in English is the following. "I am."
•	The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat" meaning "the king is helpless".
•	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." 
•	The longest English word without a true vowel (a, e, i, o or u) is "rhythm".
•	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.
•	There are only 4 English words in common use ending in "-dous": hazardous, horrendous, stupendous, and tremendous.
•	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.
•	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.
•	The following sentence contains seven 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.)   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.
•	You might know that English is the language of many lands (it’s the official language of 67 countries) but did you know it’s the language of the skies, too? That’s right, English is spoken by all pilots to identify themselves on flights, regardless of where they are from – yet another way in which learning English improves employability, to join our examples in tourism and multinational companies.
•	We use the words ‘you’ and ‘me’ all the time, but which of the two do you think is the most widely used? You might be surprised to learn that while ‘you’ is the 18th most commonly used word in the English language; ‘me’ is way back at number 50. So what is the most used English word? Exactly that: ‘the’.
•	‘Subdermatoglyphic’ is the longest English word that can be written without repeating any letters. It has 17 letters in it, and it’s the medical name for the layer of skin beneath the fingertips. Slightly easier to guess the meaning of is the word ‘uncopyrightable’, which has 15 letters without any being repeated, and refers to something that can’t be copyrighted or owned.
•	The legendary playwright was responsible for many of the things we say and write today. These include the words ‘fashionable’, ‘advertising’ and ‘laughable’, and the phrase ‘fight fire with fire’, which means to respond to attack with a similar form of attack.
•	A new word is added to the dictionary every two hours. The newest and strangest include ‘nerdjacking’ (to hijack a conversation with detailed explanations), ‘undorse’ (to reverse a policy) and ‘Mx’ (a gender-neutral form of address instead of using Mr or Ms).
•	You may know a ‘twerk’ to be a popular, thrusting dance but in the 16th century ‘twirk’ (spelt with an ‘i’ not an ‘e’) meant ‘to twist the hairs of a moustache’. Speaking of twerking, here’s a selection of some of our favourite modern words and slang terms you should know.
•	English originates from Old English, which is its earliest historical form from the 5th century. There was no punctuation until the 15th century. The oldest Old English word still used today that has the same direct meaning is ‘town’. Town has kept the same meaning as its original Old English word “tun” meaning area of dwelling.
•	There are no words in English that rhyme perfectly with ‘month’, ‘orange’, ‘silver’ or ‘purple’. The definition of a ‘perfect rhyme’ can be found here.
•	The longest word in English with its letters in alphabetical order is ‘aegilops’, which is a type of plant.
•	The first letters of the months separating June and December spell 'JASON'.  July, August, September, October, November.
•	"Shit" is one of our oldest words, and used to mean "cattle diarrhoea".   The word has its roots in Germanic and Scandinavian languages, and we've been saying it since at least 1086. Skidbrooke in Lincolnshire and Sherbourn Lane in London were both originally named for being "shit streams".
•	The chess term "checkmate" comes from a 14th century Arabic phrase, "shah mat", which means "the king is helpless".
•	Earth is the only planet in our solar system that's not named after a god.  The others are Mars, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn and Neptune (Pluto RIP).
•	English is the official language of the skies, and all pilots, regardless of their country of origin, identify themselves in English on international flights.
•	English is the third most commonly spoken language in the world (the first and second are Mandarin Chinese and Spanish).
•	More English words begin with the letter "S" than any other letter of the alphabet.
•	"Typewriter" is one of the longest common words you can type on the top row of a typewriter.  The others include "proprietor", "repertoire", and "perpetuity".
•	English is mainly a mix of Old High German, Old Norse, and Anglo-Norman. We only started speaking recognisable Modern English in the 14th Century.
•	The past tense of "dare" is "durst".
•	The closest languages to English are Dutch and West Flemish.
•	"I" is the oldest word in the English language.
•	The game of marbles gave us the phrase "knuckle down" (placing your knuckles on the floor lined up a better shot).
•	"Juke" as in "jukebox" may be derived from a West African word for "disorderly" or a Scots word for "dance". No one really knows.
•	The dot above the letters "i" and "j" is called a superscript dot.
•	"Almost" is one of the longest English words to have all its letters in alphabetical order.
•	Approximately one new word is added to the English language every two hours.
•	And the dictionary grows by about 4,000 words a year.
•	Most English grammar and spelling follow the standardised rules set out in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, which was published in 1755.
•	Only two modern English words end in "-gry": "angry" and "hungry".
•	Many people believe that the word "testify" originated in Roman times, when men swore on their testicles. Unfortunately this is not true.
•	abature (that’s the trail of trampled grass an animal leaves behind it) 
•	abligurition (spending to much money on food and drink — worth remembering that one in the run up to Christmas) 
•	zenzizenzizenzic (a 16th century word for a number raised to its eighth power) 
•	zwischenzug (a purely tactical move made to buy time). 
•	Bumblebees were nicknamed foggy-toddlers in 18th century England.
•	Pupaphobia is the fear of dolls and puppets.
•	Cowards have been called chickens since the 14th century.
•	A monepic sentence is one that contains a single word.
•	The distance between your thumb and the opposite side of your hand when it’s extended is called the shaftment.
•	In 16th century English, twirk (spelled with an E, not an I) meant “to twist the hairs of a moustache.”
•	The word creosote literally means “flesh-preserver.”
•	The feeling of calmness or contentedness that follows a pleasant dream is called euneirophrenia.
•	The word comet comes from a Greek word meaning “long-haired star.”
•	To dismantle originally meant “to remove a cloak.”
•	In its earliest known written record, the English alphabet had 29 letters.
•	Cluck-and-grunt was 1930s slang for ham and eggs.
•	An anepronym is a trade name that has come to be used generally in the language, like Kleenex, Jacuzzi or hoover.
•	In Elizabethan English, a clap of thunder was nicknamed a rounce-robble-hobble.
•	The word trampoline derives from an Italian word for a pair of stilts.
•	If you wrote out every number in the standard English counting system (one, two, three, four) in alphabetical order, no matter how high you counted the first number would always be eight.
•	The second would always be eight billion.
•	The “wherefore” of Shakespeare’s “wherefore are thou, Romeo?” means “why” not “where.”
•	In 18th century slang, “to play booty” meant “to play a game with the intention of losing.”
•	Bystanders were originally called stander-bys.
•	The opposite of serendipity is zemblanity.
•	You can use the girl’s name Rebecca as a verb meaning “to destroy a gate.”
•	If something is xyresic then it’s razor sharp.
•	On average, for every letter Q used in written English there will be 56 E’s.
•	The old Irish-English expression “to speak drugget” meant “to speak well, but occasionally slip back into your local accent.”
•	A belter-werrits is a teasing or annoying child.
•	Dogfish are so-called because they were once thought to hunt in packs.
•	Mediocre literally means “halfway up a mountain.”
•	To unhappen something means to make it look like it never took place.
•	A compulsive desire to look at something that horrifies you — like a horror film or an injury — is called cacospectomania.
•	The paddy-whack mentioned in the nursery rhyme “This Old Man” is a Victorian word for a severe beating.
•	To jakes is to walk mud into a house.
•	Counting on your fingers is properly called dactylonymy.
•	Monkey-poop is an old naval slang word for a smaller-than-normal poop deck.
•	The “pep” of pep talk is an abbreviation of “pepper.”
•	An autohagiography is an autobiography that makes the subject appear better than they actually are.
•	Pentagons were once called quinquangles.
•	Hexagons were once called sexangles.
•	The earliest written record of a rollercoaster in English comes from an 1883 article in The Chicago Tribune. It was described as “a curious structure.”
•	In 18th century English, a wobble-shop was a place where beer was sold without a license.
•	A person’s headmark comprises all of the facial features and characteristics that make them recognisable as themselves.
•	To rammack something is to turn it upside down while searching for something else.
•	Toucans used to be called egg-suckers.
•	Use of the word selfie increased by 17000% between 2012-13.
•	A group of dragonflies is called a dazzle.
•	The “skate” of cheapskate is an old American dialect word for a worn-out horse.
•	Velociraptor literally means “swift thief.”
•	To metagrobolize someone is to utterly confuse them.
•	The words a, and, be, have, he, I, in, of, that, the and to make up 25% of all written English.
•	The proper name for taking your shoes off is discalceation.
•	The name rum is a shortened form of rumbullion.
•	Turning down or pretending not to be interested in something that you really want is called accismus.
•	In 18th century slang, a heathen philosopher was someone whose underwear could be seen through his trouser pockets.
•	An aquabib is someone who chooses to drink water rather than alcohol.
•	The creases in the skin on the inside of your wrists are called the rasceta.
•	The word sheepish is a palindrome in Morse Code.
•	As a verb, tiger means “to paint something in stripes of contrasting colors.”
•	The opposite of “postpone” is prepone, meaning “to bring something forward in time.”
•	In Tudor English, ducks were nicknamed arsefeet because their legs are so far back on their bodies.
•	Since 2001, English has been the official language of all international air travel, regardless of the nationality of the pilots.
•	To honeyfuggle someone is to trick or deceive them.
•	A callomaniac is someone who thinks they’re more beautiful than they actually are.
•	An adoxography is a fine work of writing on a pointless or trivial subject.
•	Samuel Johnson left the letter X out of his dictionary, claiming that X “begins no word in the English language.”
•	A crockan is a piece of food that has shrivelled up and burned in cooking.
•	The plant nasturtium took its name from a Latin word meaning “twisted nose.”
•	Champagne literally means “open country.”
•	In Victorian slang, a flapdoodler was an annoyingly boastful or self-righteous person.
•	Nucleus derives from the Latin word for the kernel of a nut.
•	Conversation is an anagram of “voices rant on.”
•	The proper name for speaking through clenched teeth is dentiloquy.
•	Saturday wit was Tudor slang for dirty jokes.
•	Because of the pattern of holes they make in the ground, gophers take their name from an old French word for honeycomb.
•	A toot-moot is a conversation carried out entirely in whispers.
•	In 18th century slang, a waffle-frolic was a sumptuous meal or feast.
•	The sentence “this sentence contains thirty-six letters” contains 36 letters.
•	Dutch pink is a shade of yellow.
•	In 1930s slang, artillery was any food that caused gas.
•	The “wuther” of Wuthering Heights is an old English dialect word for a sudden and strong gust of wind.
•	If something is obliviable then it’s able to be forgotten.
•	The old Scots word growk means “the determined look a child gives to something she or he really wants.”
•	In Old English, bad weather was called unweather.
•	A slawterpooch is a lazy or ungainly person.
•	Hypengophobia is the hatred of having responsibilities.
•	Chameleon literally means “dwarf lion.”
•	In Victorian slang, a polly-in-the-cottage was a man who enjoyed doing housework.
•	The head of an asparagus is called the squib.
•	To frowst is to keep yourself warm in cold weather.
•	Anything described as hippocrepiform is shaped like a horseshoe.
•	Shakespeare invented the word lackluster.
•	A myriad is literally 10,000 of something.
•	In 1920s slang, a wagger-pagger-bagger was a wastepaper basket.
•	In Old English, arselings meant “heading in a backward direction.”
•	Using too many words to explain an otherwise straightforward point is called macrology.
•	A wonder-horn is a collection of amazing things.
•	A doryphore is a pestering person who draws attention to other people’s errors.
•	GIF stands for “graphics interchange format.” According to its inventor, it should be pronounced “jiff” not “giff.”
•	To snirtle is to try to suppress a laugh.
•	In Elizabethan slang, tailors were nicknamed snip-snappers.
•	A lampus is an awkward and clumsy fall, part way through which you try to grab onto something to try and stop from falling.
•	Amplexation is a 17th century word for embracing someone.
•	Posing a question for rhetorical effect and then answering it yourself is called anthypophora.
•	A batrachomyomachy is a petty, pointless argument or quibble.
•	Bung was Victorian slang for a teapot. A Bohemian bungery was a bar frequented by struggling writers and musicians.
•	To calamistrate is to curl your hair.
•	In 16th century English, a carpet-monger was a womanizing man.
•	In 18th century English, a cockmedainty was an overly prim or fastidious person.
•	Talking in code is called cryptolalia.
•	The loose feathers that fall out of cushions and pillows are the culf.
•	Drumbledrane is an old English word for a little bumblebee.
•	Essence-peddler was a 19th century nickname for a skunk.
•	Euthymy is a 17th century word for total tranquillity and peace of mind.
•	Gangelwæfre is an Old English word for a spider. It literally means ‘walking-weaver’.
•	Gloffin is an old Scots English word for a short, disturbed sleep.
•	Goostrumnoodle is a Cornish dialect word for a fool.
•	To hanvayge is to wait around for someone to turn up...
•	...and hoozy-poozy is an 18th century word for anything idly done just to pass the time.
•	A heautoscopy is a dream or hallucination in which a person imagines seeing their own body from a distance.
•	A little heap is called a hipple.
•	Shakespeare used the word housekeeper to mean ‘guard dog’.
•	If you’re imberbic then you don’t have a beard.
•	Jottle is an old Scots English word meaning ‘to achieve nothing despite looking busy’.
•	Katagelophobia is the fear of being ridiculed.
•	A group of kittens is called a kindle.
•	A period of five years is called a lustre.
•	In Victorian slang, a masterpiece of nightwork was a strikingly handsome criminal.
•	To moonstomp is to dance heavy-footedly...
•	...and an orchestromaniac is someone who can’t help but dance.
•	A nephew was originally a grandson.
•	To obnunciate is to announce bad news.
•	A giraffe’s horns are properly called ossicones.
•	The human tendency to see faces and other images where none actually exists is called pareidolia.
•	To be peneomnipotent is to be almost, but not quite, all-powerful.
•	All the food you take on a picnic is called the picnickery.
•	The paragraph symbol ¶ is properly called a pilcrow.
•	A punchclod is someone who works a lowly or difficult, manual job.
•	To puppilate is to scream like a peacock.
•	To glocidate is to cluck like a hen
•	The quick- of ‘quicksilver’ literally means ‘living’.
•	Roiderbanks is an old Yorkshire dialect word for someone who lives extravagantly or beyond their means.
•	Sea-legs is the ability to walk around a ship in rough seas. Land-legs is the ability to walk on dry land afterwards.
•	So-called because St. Anthony was the patron saint of swineherds, a St. Anthony pig is a mindless follower or fanatic, or a sponging companion.
•	‘The sun is over the foreyard’ is an old naval expression meaning ‘it’s time for a drink’.
•	If you’re an English speaker, roughly 6% of all the language you’ll ever use will be just the word the.
•	Thrimble is an old Yorkshire word meaning ‘to toy with something in your fingers that you’re reluctant to part with’.
•	Your tongueshot is the distance within which you can be heard.
•	A wag-feather is a cocky, swaggering young man.
•	A willingness to entertain strangers is called xenodochy.
•	The amount you can hold in your hands when you cup them together like a bowl is called the yepsen.
•	Of the 5,000 commonest words in the English language, only zone begins with a Z.
•	‘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’.
•	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.
•	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’.
•	‘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.
•	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.
•	The proper name for cutting your own hair is self-tonsorialism. ‘Tonsorialist’ is an old-world word that encompasses several professions, including barber.
•	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’.
•	An autological word is one that describes itself — like unhyphenated or short. The shortest complete sentence in English is the following. ‘I am.’
•	‘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.
•	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.
•	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.
•	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.’
•	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.
•	The past tense of ‘dare’ is ‘durst’. However, the word is archaic and no longer widely used.
•	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’.
•	There are only four words in the English language that end in ‘dous’. They are: hazardous, horrendous, stupendous and tremendous.
•	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.
•	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’.
•	Bamboozle derives from a French word, embabouiner, meaning ‘to make a baboon out of someone’. To metagrobolise someone is to utterly confuse them.
•	In Tudor English, a ‘gandermooner’ was a man who flirted with other women while his wife recovered from childbirth.
•	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.
•	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.
•	The longest English word with its letters in reverse alphabetical order is the compound word ‘spoonfeed’.
•	‘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.
•	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.
•	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.’
•	Although an ounce is commonly known as a unit of weight, it is also a duration of seven and a half seconds.
•	‘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.
•	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.
•	‘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’.
•	The chess term ‘checkmate’ comes from the 14th Century Arabic phrase, ‘shah mat’, which means ‘the king is helpless’.
•	Hogwash is literally kitchen scraps used to feed pigs. The first writer who used it figuratively to mean ‘nonsense’ was Mark Twain.
•	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’.
•	The longest single-syllabled word in the English language is ‘screeched’. Similarly, ‘strengths’ is the longest word with just one vowel.
•	The shortest word containing all five main vowels is ‘eunoia’, meaning ‘beautiful thinking’ or a state of normal mental health.
•	‘The countryside’ is an anagram of ‘no city dust here’, while ‘psithurism’ is the sound of the wind rustling through leaves.
•	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’.
•	To ‘exulcerate’ someone literally means to annoy or irritate them as much as an ulcer would.
•	The second least used letter is ‘Q’. In written English, only one letter in every 510 is a Q.
•	English is an official language in seventy-nine countries and territories. It is the third most commonly spoken language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.
•	The dot above the letters ‘i’ and ‘j’ is called a superscript dot. Colloquially, it is also called a tittle.
•	Dermatoglyphics is the study of fingerprints and skin patterns. It is also the longest English word comprised entirely of different letters.
•	The opposite of déjà-vu is jamais-vu. It is the unnerving feeling that something very familiar is completely new.
•	The first letters of the months separating June and December spell ‘JASON’.
•	The adjectival form of abracadabra is ‘abracadabrant’. It is used to describe something marvellous, dazzlingly impressive, or anything that has apparently happened by magic.
•	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.
•	English is the official language of the skies. All pilots on international flights must identify themselves in English regardless of their country of origin.
•	‘Famgrasping’ is when you shake hands with someone in an agreement or to make up a difference. ‘Fam’ corresponds with the word hand.
•	‘E’ is the most commonly used letter in the alphabet. It comprises eleven percent of the entire English language.
•	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.
•	Understanding English actually hurts professional players of English scrabble. Some of the world’s best Scrabble players are Thai and can’t speak English. – Source
•	The English words moose, opossum, pecan, raccoon, skunk, and squash all originated from the now-extinct language of the Algonquian people, the native tribe inhabiting the site of the earliest English colony in what is now the US at Roanoke Island. – Source
•	In English, multiple adjectives are supposed to be listed in the following order: Quantity, Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material and Purpose. – Source
•	Many English words used to be spelled phonetically (e.g. debt was ‘det’) until some scholars purposely added silent letters to make them look more like Greek or Latin words, sometimes erroneously. – Source
•	The word “electrocute” is a combination of the words electro and execute, meaning killed by electricity. So if you don’t die, you were not electrocuted, you were shocked. – Source
•	Before the English speaking world was exposed to the fruit, the color orange was referred to as “geoluhread” which is Old English for red-yellow. – Source
•	In addition to the word “lord” evolving from a word literally meaning “keeper of bread”, “lady” evolved from a word literally meaning “kneader of bread.” – Source
•	If you write any number in words (English), count the number of letters, write this new number in words and so on, you’ll always end with number 4. – Source
•	English words for livestock (cow, sheep, chicken) are Germanic-based and the words for meats (beef, mutton, poultry) are French-based. This is because the people who raised the animals were Anglo-Saxon peasants and the people who ate them were Norman aristocrats. – Source
•	The word “set” has 464 definitions, making it the word with the most variety. – Source
•	The word “dude” was first used in the late 1800s as an insult towards young men who were overly concerned with keeping up with the latest fashions. – Source
•	There is a word that is the opposite of sparkle and it is “darkle.”1 – Source
•	The word “minute” comes from “the first MINUTE (small) division of an hour.” The word “Second” comes from “the SECOND minute division of an hour.” – Source
•	The word “legend” originally meant “things to be read.” In the pre-Medieval period, reading and writing were very rare, and so anything worthy of being written down was something very noteworthy, and thus “legendary”; worthy of being written down and read. – Source
•	The word “camel” in “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” may be an incorrect translation of the word for rope. – Source
•	The English word ‘infant’ comes from the Latin word ‘infans’, meaning “unable to speak” or “speechless.” – Source
•	“Bookkeeper” is the only word in English language with three consecutive Double letters.
•	The word “retarded” came into popular use during the 1960’s because it was considered far less offensive and more politically correct than labeling someone a m*ron, idiot or imbecile. – Source
•	The word cereal comes from the Roman goddess Ceres, and her association with edible grains. – Source
•	The word “barbecue” has been around since 1650, and it has meant “outdoor meal of roasted meat or fish as a social entertainment” since 1733. – Source
•	The Mayan god of wind and storms was called Jun Raqan, pronounced “Huracan”, hence the English word “Hurricane.” – Source
•	The word “Aibohphobia” meaning “fear of palindromes”, is a joke word deliberately constructed to be one. – Source
•	The word “liberal” in liberal arts means worthy of a free person (as opposed to a slave), and such an education isn’t meant to get you a job but rather to make you useful in a free society.
•	Acronyms are said like words, while initialisms are individual letters. For example, NATO is an acronym and FBI is an initialism. – Source
•	Old English used the word ‘dore’ for male bees. Dumbledore means bumblebee.
•	Stewardesses and reverberated are the two longest words (12 letters each) that can be typed using only the left hand. The longest word that can be typed using only the right hand is lollipop. Skepticisms is the longest word that alternates hands. 
•	A group of geese on the ground is a gaggle, a group of geese in the air is a skein. The underside of a horse's hoof is called a frog. The frog peels off several times a year with new growth. 
•	The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following 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.” 
•	The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable. 
•	Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning "containing arsenic." 
•	The word 'pound' is abbreviated 'lb.' after the constellation 'libra' because it means 'pound' in Latin, and also 'scales'. The abbreviation for the British Pound Sterling comes from the same source: it is an 'L' for libra/Lb. with a stroke through it to indicate abbreviation. Same goes for the Italian lira which uses the same abbreviation ('lira' coming from 'libra'). So British currency (before it went metric) was always quoted as "pounds/shillings/pence", abbreviated "L/s/d" 
•	The only nation who's name begins with an "A", but doesn't end in an "A" is Afghanistan. 
•	Honorificabilitudinity Obs. rare - a grandiose extension of honorificabilitudo honourableness.  It is the longest word Shakespeare ever used, is a variant of today's word; "I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon." [Love's Labour's Lost, Act 5, Scene 1]