What are some mind-blowing 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
•	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. – Source


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.”

59. 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. – Source


Minhas Kamal, Software Engineer at Samsung (2017-present)
Updated Sat
Every English word, to be more specific every syllable, needs vowel (a, e, i, o, u) or at least a semivowel (y, w) to spell. There are actually very few words containing no vowel (only semivowel), like- 'my', 'sky', ‘sync’, etc. The longest word without a vowel is- 'RHYTHMS'. ‘STRENGTHS’ is largest word containing only one vowel.
There are also words containing all 5 vowels- 'authorize', 'education', etc. Smallest word containing all vowels is- ‘EUNOIA’, means- beautiful thinking. There are only two words having all five vowels in order: 'ABSTEMIOUS' and 'FACETIOUS'. ‘SUBCONTINENTAL’- vowels are in reverse order. The word 'MOUTH-WATERING-LY' contains all vowels and semivowels.
You may even see words containing only vowels- 'a', ‘i’, 'oi'; longest word of this kind is- 'EUOUAE'. It means- a kind of rhythmic flow in medieval music.
English language has some big words- 'antidisestablishmentarianism', 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'. The largest word in Oxford English Dictionary is- 'PNEUMO-NO-ULTRA-MICROSCOPIC-SILICO-VOLCANO-CONIOSIS' _♪_ (45 letters), refers to a lung disease. You must be thinking- who makes/uses these words? This is what you get when one new word is added to the dictionary in every two hours.
'SCRAUNCHED', means- to strengthen, is the longest monosyllablic word.
Words without a repeating letter/pattern are called- isograms. The Longest isogram is- 'SUB-DERMATO-GLYPHIC'; may be you do not want to know its meaning.
The place having the longest name is a hill in New Zealand. It is called 'TAUMATA WHAKATANGI HANGAKOAUAU O TAMATEA TURI PUKAKAPIKI MAUNGA HORO NUKU POKAI WHENUA KITANATAHU' (85 letters), which translates- the place where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, who slid, climbed and swallowed mountains, known as 'landeater’, played his flute to his loved one. So, how does local people call this place? Obviously they are not nuts, they simply call it- ‘Taumata Hill’.
 
If we reverse the word ‘head’ we get ‘daeh’; which means nothing. Reversing ‘edit’ gives ‘tide’; another word. However, reversing ‘eye’ yields the same word. This type of word that spells the same backward is called palindrome. ‘DETARTRATED’ is the largest palindrome word. A palindrome sentence- ‘Live not on evil’.
A sentence or verse that contains all 26 alphabets is called- pangram. Here is an example- ‘A brown fox quickly jumps over the lazy dog’. ‘Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx’ is an isogramic pangram.
 
‘I saw a saw to saw with a saw’ illustrates- I saw (to see) a saw (woodcutter) to saw (to cut wood) with a saw (tool for cutting wood).
‘I know that, that ‘that’ that boy used is wrong’ implies- someone used ‘that’ in a wrong place, and I know that.
Put correct punctuation mark here- ‘a woman without her man is nothing’. Which one do you think is better- ‘A woman, without her man, is nothing’ or, ‘A woman: without her, man is nothing’.
‘Let’s eat grandma’ forgetting a punctuation mark may even kill you grandma, and make you cannibal! Comma is the life saver- ‘Let’s eat, grandma’.





•	Pronunciation is the most mispronounced word in the English language.
•	“This exceeding trifling witling, considering ranting criticising concerning adopting fitting wording being exhibiting transcending learning, was displaying, notwithstanding ridiculing, surpassing boasting swelling reasoning, respecting correcting erring writing, and touching detecting deceiving arguing during debating,” is a completely grammatically correct sentence, that actually means, “This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate.”
•	“I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness,” is another completely legal sentence. Each word is one letter longer than the previous one, and the sentence was created by Dmitri Borgmann.



Just a few out of thousands of candidates:
1.	Everyone knows that there are 2 indefinite articles: a before a consonant sound (a book), an before a vowel (an author). But did you know that there are two forms of the? We say ‘thuh’ before a consonant (the book) and ‘thee’ before a vowel (the author) or a pause.
2.	There are 3 ways of pronouncing the -ed past tense endings: t as in ‘liked’, d as in ‘loved’ and id as in ‘wanted’.
3.	Similarly with the -s endings: s as in ‘cats’, z as in ‘dogs’ and iz as in ‘horses’. It all depends on the characteristics of the final sound - all English speakers subconsciously know this, applying the rule effortlessly to new words.
4.	Sounds appear in, and between words, without our noticing. For example when aw is followed by a vowel sound, a small r is usually inserted: drawring, law rand order.
5.	When oo is followed by a vowel sound a small w appears: who (w) are, you (w) all (remember Basil Fawlty mentioning the war?)
6.	The h sound (at the beginning of a word) isn’t a separate sound (as it looks in the spelling), but is a puff of air said at the same time as the following vowel.
7.	What’s the difference between photograph and photographer? Just that er, right? But in speech, this also happens:
•	the rhythm (stress) changes: PHO-to-GRAPH pho-TO-graph-er
•	EVERY vowel changes

The same thing happens to many words when they change their grammatical class: biology-biological, super-superfluous, a rebel - to rebel. This feature is a very good reason why, if English spelling were to be changed so that it exactly represented the sounds, we would end up with more complication and confusion .
8. Stress is used (far more than most other languages) to change meaning. Compare how you would say ‘a black BIRDcage’ and ‘a BLACKbird cage’ (no, it’s not about the gaps between the words. There are no gaps.)
9. Making a question is very complicated (although also completely logical). To put this statement into a question She worked in London, you have to carry out the following operations:
a.	Add an auxiliary verb do
b.	Make it agree with she: She does worked in London
c.	Remove the past tense marker (-ed) in the main verb, and put the auxiliary in the past tense: She did work in London
d.	Swap the auxiliary and the subject: Did she work in London?
10. While many languages have only one or two past tenses, English uses at least 8 verb forms to talk about the past, all with their own shade of meaning:
•	I ate
•	I have eaten
•	I had eaten
•	I was eating
•	I have been eating
•	I had been eating
•	I used to eat
•	I would eat (as in ‘When I was 10 I would eat ice cream every day’)
10. We can also use past tenses to talk about the present or even the future:
•	I wish you were here with me now.
•	If only I was rich.
•	If I won a million pounds, I would give it all to you.
11. (Although this is not particular to English) The human brain cleverly ignores what is not useful to us, which means that most of the goings-on of language operates outside of our awareness, even when (as in the above examples) the evidence is right there hiding in open sight, literally under our noses. That is the joy of learning about language. Most comedy that is language or pun-based exploits this: the realisation of a language feature that is both hitherto unknown, but suddenly completely obvious, make us laugh.




Ampersand (&) used to be the 27th character of the English alphabet.
During the earlier times, there used to be 27 characters in the English alphabet that started with A and ended with & right after Z.
This is a page from an 1863 textbook displaying the alphabet in which & is displayed as the 27th character.
 
The shape of the character & had existed for several centuries. When the Romans wrote the Latin word et which means “and”, they linked the e and t. It looked somewhat like this:
 
Over time, the ligature of the letters et came to signify “and” in English as well.
The “ampersand” has a rather interesting etymology.
In the early 19th century, when the school children were reciting ABCs that included the & at the end, they would say “X Y Z and per se and”. “Per se” means “by itself”. So the students were essentially saying “X Y Z and by itself and”.
“And per se and” eventually morphed into Ampersand. Its a mondegreen - a word that came from a mistaken pronunciation.



“Mind-blowing”, eh? Let’s do allophones, then.
Hold the back of your hand about an inch in front of your mouth and say “spot”. Now say “pot”. Repeat this a few times and you’ll notice something: a lot more air comes out of your mouth when you say the /p/ in “pot” than when you say the /p/ in spot.
The reason for this is that the /p/ in “pot” and the /p/ in “spot” are different sounds - the former is aspirated (said with an extra puff of air) and the latter is unaspirated(puff-less).
Now put the back of your hand in front of your mouth and say “start”, then “tart”. Repeat this a few times and you’ll notice a similar phenomenon: the /t/ in “tart” is accompanied by a puff of air, whereas the /t/ in “start” is not. Again, this is because “tart” is aspirated and “start” is not.
And once again, put the back of your hand in front of your mouth and say “kill”, then “skill”, then “kill”, then “skill”. The /k/ in “kill” is aspirated, but the /k/ in “skill” is not.
There are two things you may be wondering at this point:
1.	Why does this happen?
2.	Why have I never noticed this?
The answer to the first is that in English, unvoiced stops (/p/, /t/, and /k/, as opposed to the voiced stops /b/, /d/, and /g/, respectively) are aspirated at the start of a syllable. If you’re a native anglophone, this is a rule you never had to be taught in school - baby brains are really good at picking out sounds.
The answer to the second is a bit more complicated. In all languages, there are certain sounds that sound the same to a speaker of that language, even though the sounds may be obviously different to a speaker of another language where those two sounds are differentiated.
For example, the sounds “l” and “r” sound the same to a native monolingual speaker of Japanese, but these sounds seem very obviously different to a native speaker of English. There’s a word for the obviously separate sounds used in a language: phonemes.
Likewise, the aspirated and unaspirated sounds I mentioned sound the same to a native monolingual speaker of English, but those sounds seem just as obviously different to a native speaker of Hindi as “l” and “r” would seem to an English speaker.
There’s a word for this sort of thing: allophones. In Japanese, the “l” and “r” sounds are allophones. In English, they’re two separate sounds, so they’re phonemes, not allophones - there’s a pretty big distinction between serving your guest rice and giving them a big bowl of annoying parasites.
In English, the aspirated [pʰ] sound and the unaspirated [p] sound are allophones. In Hindi, though, a distinction is made - there’s a pretty big distinction between pal (“moment, instant”) and pʰal (“fruit”).
Aspirated vs unaspirated stops isn’t the only example of allophones in English. There are a lot, and it would take a long time to list every single one, but here are some of them:
•	In some dialects, [ʔ] (the glottal stop) and [t] can be used interchangeably in some situations, usually between two vowels and/or at the end of a word, as in “bu'on” for “button” or “abou'” for “about”.
•	The “l” in “light” is called a “clear ‘l’”, or [l], and the “l” in “tell” is called a “dark ‘l’”, or [ɫ]; they’re considerably different sounds.
•	[d], [t], and [ɾ] (a sort of tongue-flap sound) are allophones intervocalically in some dialects, most notably American ones.
•	[ç] (as in German ich) and [hj] are allophones, as in “human”. Same for [ɲ] (as in Spanish niño) and [nj], as in “canyon”, and [ʎ] (as in Italian gli) and [lj], as in “million”.
•	/n/ before a labiodental fricative (/f/ or /v/) sounds like a funny “m” sound (specifically [ɱ]).
•	/ɔ/ and /ɑ/ are allophones in some dialects. If “cot” and “caught” sound the same to you, your dialect has undergone the cot-caught merger.
This isn’t unique to English in any way - as I mentioned, all languages have allophones - but it’s certainly “mind-blowing” when you learn about them for the first time.



"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" 

The above line is a grammatically correct sentence in American English, used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs.

Quoting from Wikipedia:
The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". In order of their first use, these are:
•	a. the city of Buffalo, New York, United States, which is used as a noun adjunct in the sentence and is followed by the animal; (Note the capital letter 'B' in front of this word and small 'b' in other words.)
•	n. the noun buffalo, an animal, in the plural (equivalent to "buffaloes" or "buffalos"), in order to avoid articles;
•	v. the verb "buffalo" meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.

Marking each "buffalo" with its use as shown above gives:
Buffalo(a) buffalo(n) Buffalo(a) buffalo(n) buffalo(v) buffalo(v) Buffalo(a) buffalo(n).
The sentence uses a restrictive clause, so there are no commas, nor is there the word "which," as in, "Buffalo buffalo, which Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo." This clause is also a reduced relative clause, so the word that, which could appear between the second and third words of the sentence, is omitted.
So, the actual interpretation of the line would sound like :
"The buffalo from Buffalo who are buffaloed by buffalo from Buffalo, buffalo (verb) other buffalo from Buffalo."
For a better understanding, let's use the word 'bison' in place of the noun for the animal 'buffalo', and 'bully' in place of the verb "buffalo', and keep 'Buffalo' as the city. Now it reads like :
Buffalo bison, whom other Buffalo bison bully, themselves bully Buffalo bison.
 


Another example for highlighting the importance of punctuation in English language :
"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher"
This again, is grammatically correct in English language, but can be understood only if used with punctuation.
The story behind the sentence :
The sentence refers to two students, James and John, who are required by an English test to describe a man who, in the past, had suffered from a cold. John writes "The man had a cold" which the teacher marks as being incorrect, while James writes the correct "The man had had a cold." Since James' answer was right, it had had a better effect on the teacher.
Now, see the magic the punctuation makes on that sentence :
James, while John had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.

Savvy ??? 




Some interesting facts here :
1.	Acronyms are said like words, while initialisms are individual letters. For example, NATO is an acronym and FBI is an initialism! - Source
2.	In English, multiple adjectives are supposed to be listed in the following order: Quantity, Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material and Purpose – Source
3.	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
4.	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
5.	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
6.	The English word ‘infant’ comes from the Latin word ‘infans’, meaning “unable to speak” or “speechless.” – Source
7.	Before the English speaking world was exposed to the fruit, the color orange was referred to as “geoluhread” which is Old English for yellow-red – Source
 



This is not exactly a fact but just something I came across and found it amazing
The beauty of English language is that Loneliness defines the pain of being alone, and
Solitude defines the glory of being alone.
BOYCOTT
To protest by withdrawing the usage, purchase or relations with someone or something. Named after Charles Boycott, an Irish land agent, who was excluded from the Irish Land League for evicting poor tenants.
During the Irish Land War, Captain Charles Boycott served as the land agent for an absent landlord, Lord Erne. In a year when harvests were poor, Lord Erne gave 10 percent reduction in rents. But later, in September that year, he refused to accept 25 percent as demanded by the protesting tenants. Charles Stewart Parnell gave a speech before any of these events occurred and said that the new tenants who take the farms of evicted tenants should be shunned instead of using violence. Though Boycott isn’t actually a new tenant but a land agent, the villagers started isolating him by stopping working in his field and house, and trading with him or even delivering his mail.


Alarm: The world has been witnessing a process of de-standardization of the language, unnoticeably.
•	Variant spellings are accepted
•	Punctuation marks are omitted.
•	Capital letters are used to show anger.
•	Misspellings convey humour.
•	Emoticons express a range of reactions and replace lively words.
•	English dialects are fast getting lost among their speakers, thanks to the dominance of US usage in the digital world.
•	A list called ‘endangered words’ has emerged.
•	Neologisms are on the rise: mansplaining, awesomesauce, rly, bants, TL;DR(too long; didn’t read).



The 20 Strangest Sentences In The English Language




English did not originate from England.
It originated from Germany from a people called Angles who were so-called because they lived in a part of the West German seaside that formed an angle.
The inhabitants of this angular West German seaside decided to invade an island known as Britain where people spoke a cluster of languages called Gaelic or Celt.
Other names by which the languages are known are Erse or Goidelic.
The West German invaders from the angular coastline who mixed with, and sometimes drove away, the autochthonous Celts decided to call their language “Aenglisch” and to rename the island of Britain“Aengland” (later England) in honor of “Angles,” their place of origin in West Germany.
Although some words in the original Celtic languages made their way to “Aenglisch,” which later became “English,” their influence has been marginal at best.
That is why Scottish, Welsh, and other Celtic languages in the UK are not intelligible to English speakers.



“Change is of course one of the most reliable indications of a healthy and growing language. And no language has ever grown so luxuriantly or changed so radically as English.”
You may remember the anecdote that was told of King George the First of England and Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul Cathedral in London. Upon the completion of the masterly edifice, the king told Wren that his work was “amusing, awful and artificial.” Sir Christopher was delighted with the royal compliment, inasmuch as 300 years ago amusing meant amazing, awful meant awe-inspiring, and artificial meant artistic.
That is a dramatic indication of how the meanings of words change over the years. Latin and Greek, of course, are dead languages and are therefore static, but a language as vital and alive as English is in a constant state of flux.
Here are some examples to demonstrate the evolution:
•	In very olden days, roses used to “stink.” This was not the fault of the flowers but of the word.
•	“Villain” is another once respectable word that degenerated. Originally a “villain” was a farm laborer, or one who worked in a villa.
•	In the 16th century, “specious” meant “beautiful,” “stupid” meant “amazed,” and “mortified” meant “deadened.”
•	A few short years ago “broadcast” meant merely “to sow seed.”
•	“Asylum,” which comes from the Greek asylon, “no right of seizure,” meant originally “a place of refuge.” In modern times this word has been so corrupted that it has signified only “lunatic asylum.”
•	If civilization had not changed from Anglo-Saxon times, “curious” would still mean “careful,” and “silly” would still mean “blessed.”
So the mind blowing fact about the English language is that it shifts, changes, grows, and is alive to the fingertips. Change is normal, and 100 years from now many of the words whose meanings are suitable to the civilization of the 20th century will probably undergo startling changes in order to adapt to the 21st!



Really amazing facts down here! Allow me to share a few, that I know of.
Saved the best one for the last!
1) J and Q were not a part of the initial alphabet. They were added only later.
2) RHYTHM(S) is the longest word without a vowel.
3) The English word alphabet comes (via Latin) from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta.
4) 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")
And Finally... Hold your breath...
5) "I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting: nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunication' s incomprehensibleness."
Anything peculiar about this one? Look again?
I
do
not
know
where
family
doctors
acquired
illegibly
perplexing
handwriting
nevertheless
extraordinary
pharmaceutical
intellectuality
countrebalancing
indecipherability
transcendantalizes
intercommunication's
incomprihensibleness
Count the length of each word. The first word is 1 letter long, the second word is 2 letters, and the third is 3, and so on... till the end!


The sound we have in the middle of ‘butter’ isn’t a T, but a flap. The same sound is heard as an R in other languages such as Spanish.
The sound we have in the middle of ‘kitten’ isn’t a T or a flap, but a glottal stop!
Syllables don’t actually have to have a vowel in them. Different languages have different rules about what sounds are ‘syllabic’, but in English we have R (but-ter), L (lib-el), and N (mis-sion). All of these have vowels in the *spelling*, but if you say them out loud (and not slowly, or over-enunciating, just the way you normally say them) you can hear that there’s no actual vowel there.
Adjectives have a specific order in English: “opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.” (source)
The word for ‘purple’ didn’t use to exist, which is why we say “Roses are red, violets are blue.”
You say ‘hamster’ with a P in it. Also the sound at the end of ‘song’ isn’t ‘ng’ but a distinct sound we don’t have a letter for. (source)
I realize these sources are from tumblr, but I do have a degree in this shit, my tumblr is just the handiest source.
“Abso-fucking-lutely.” You can only do this thing (infixation) with one word in the English language (and its derivatives, ie frickin, freaking). Other languages use it all the time.
“The horse raced past the barn fell.” is grammatical.



The fight is over, people. Our poorly educated children have won.
Recently Google, Merriam-Webster, and Macmillan added an additional definition for the word “literally.” Now, it can indicate emphasis when a given situation is not literally true. “I literally died of embarrassment” is now a valid sentence, despite the fact that embarrassment can’t actually kill you.
Naturally, the word police are aghast. Adding new definitions to words goes against all propriety and is one more sign that the long-awaited end is indeed upon us.
1. Shakespeare invented half the words he used.
OK, not half, but a lot. “Assassinate,” “besmirch,” “impartial,” “worthless,” “grovel,” “mimic,” “noiseless”—all these and more didn’t exist before Shakespeare decided to lump them together for the sake of fitting his iambic pentameter. Thanks a lot, Shakespeare, for besmirching the dignity of our mother tongue.
2. It wasn’t originally “butterfly.”
As if inventing words wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that words sometimes change their spelling over time, too. Case in point – the word “butterfly” was originally “flutterby,” which makes a whole lot more sense since many butterflies aren’t yellow and none of them taste like butter. Thanks a lot, butterflies.
3. Old English is unreadable.
Not just because it’s boring. It’s literally unreadable. (I’m using “literally” in its original definition, by the way.) Don’t believe me? Then check out this randomly selected passage from the epic poem “Beowulf”:
HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas, syððanærest wearð
feasceaft funden.
Seriously, that’s Old English. That’s where all the words I’m writing now theoretically come from.
Thanks a lot, Old English. I would insult you properly, but I don’t know how to use any words that you’d understand.
 Approximately 4,000 new words are added to the dictionary every year.
Basic math says that’s 40,000 every decade. According to the BBC, a new word is created every 98 minutes. And though there’s no consensus for this, it’s estimated that the average person knows between 35,000 and 75,000 words. So if you’re 20 years old, there have been more words invented in your lifetime than are in your entire vocabulary. Thanks a lot, English language. As if I weren’t already feeling unimpressive enough.
As you can see, I side with the word police. The English language should have stuck with the same 12 words we had when we started grunting it back in Beowulf’s day. And similarly, your own systems, processes, and ways of thinking should be correspondingly rigid. Emulate the dinosaurs, my friends. They knew better than to change, and they died the noble death of the sea captain going down with his ship.
Except the ones that changed into birds and lizards and things.



We all talk in what was once 16th century chat speak.
Goodbye.
•	Godbwye.
o	God b w ye.
	God be with you.
And that's how polite people signed off letters way back until the 16th century. God be with you.
Until some bloke in the 16th century decided that writing out 'God be with you' wasn't worth his time and shortened it to GOD B W YE, which appeared as GODBWYE. Which eventually led to it's becoming goodbye, a word we're all familiar with today.
Who'd have imagined that 16th century chat speak would one day become legit words in the English dictionary, eh?
Maybe a few centuries down the line, UKWIM will be a word in the 394th edition of the Oxford Dictionary.
goodbye- Wiktionary
*waits for someone to spot and acknowledge the Harry Potter reference*



Consider this sentence:
“Who’s afraid of the Bad Big Wolf?”
If English is your native language, you’ll notice that the sentence sounds wierd. It should be “Big Bad Wolf”- it sounds correct. Why?
Because you have to list your adjectives in a certain order:
Number- opinion- size- age- shape- colour- origin- material- purpose- NOUN.
So you can have “five delightful small old circular brown spanish packing crates.” But you can’t have said packing crates in a screwed up order, because of the grammar rule.
People who speak English as their native language know this without knowing the rule. That’s why you say “The Big Bad Wolf”. Nobody says “The Bad Big Wolf”, because it violates the grammar law.





1.	English has the worst phonemicity of all Western languages.
2.	There are 80 spelling rules and many of them are exceptions to other rules.
3.	English spelling forces teacher-led TEACHING AND PEDAGOGY
4.	Effect on educational budgets: higher cost, higher taxes,…
5.	STATS: illiteracy
6.	INFORMATION AND SOLUTIONS
________________________________________
EXPLANATIONS
1.	English has the worst phonemicity of all Western languages.
 
Its spelling system is so flawed that it is estimated that half of its lexicon should be respelled (and follow its most basic spelling rules), if we extrapolate on the work of Masha Bell who analyzed 7000 of the most common words in English (Improving English spelling).
The real issue is at the vowel system. Consonants are, by and large, matching their sound or phoneme. Here is a clear diagram demonstrating the scope of the problem.
 
/ə/ : about, children, pencil, renovate, supply, syringe, luscious, mission, blood, does, cousin, thorough, and especially
/ei/: great, raid, grey, gray, ballet, mate, table, caffe, matine, reggae, vein, vain
/ɛ/: bear, care, aerial, their, there, questionnaire, mayor, bury, any, friend, leopard
/i:/: be, been, bean, key, mere, elite, people, ski, debris, quay
The schwa has 13 spellings: about, children, pencil, renovate, supply, syringe, luscious, mission, blood, does, cousin, thorough, and especially. (Even “one” or o_e could be included as it is pronounced “wun”.) So, even 14! (I am including stressed syllables/words as schwas like in does, which some phoneticians feel are very different than the “a” in “about”. This linguistics university course 115 (Pennsylvania) seems to indicate I am right: Phonetic symbols and this linguist in speech makes a case for the schwa being just a reduced phoneme of the /ʌ/). Variation of what a schwa is like in different dialects of English. Still, a schwa is not an “o”!
 
 
2. There are 80 spelling rules and many of them are exceptions to other rules.
3. English spelling forces teacher-led TEACHING AND PEDAGOGY
This spelling system retards kids' learning, the ability to read, pronounce, and spell words (although the last item is thankfully helped by spell checkers) and it prevents (as children learn to manage the code) the use of more student-centered learning like the Montessori approach advocates. The complexity of the code forces programs, curricula to use methods and pedagogies where teachers are the model, the corrector, the guide. For instance, there is this standard method in learning disabilities sessions were the learning disability teacher guide the student to learn the code. These are called “guided reading” sessions.

The teacher listens (monitor) the decoding, check, asks, prompts,… This is clearly a teacher-led activity. Now, these sessions are given to students who are struggling readers, but there are other activities that are teacher-led or teacher-monitored like calendar activities (which might be led by one student, incidentally). This activity is class-wide. One student or the teacher speaks and everyone listens. Standard practice (and it is heavily recommended in school districts that I have taught in) is the teacher reading out loud as students read the same text themselves. All of these activities are not “montessori-like”, are not student-led in the sense that each is independently reading all kinds of books. In most primary classes, books are highly levelled. The only time when kids can really read what they want is when they go to the library to take some books out. The code limits the kind of books they could read. I am arguing that the difficulty of the code makes it so.
 
(Thank you Laura Ling for the excellent question/comment, which forced me to edit and clarify)
4. Effect on educational budgets: higher cost, higher taxes
How bad is the spelling system for kids and learners? Well, if you are lucky (sort of), there will be more teachers in schools; they will be called all...
 (more)



Can you try to write a sentence without using the letter ‘e’ ?
Now, read this.
“ Now Gadsby was vigorously against graft; not only in city affairs but in any kind of transaction and that stab brought forth such flow of oratory from him, that as voting for mayor was soon to occur, it, and a long list of good works soon had him up for that position.”
Vowels are very important part in English language.
A, E, I, O, U are the most beautiful letters. One cannot form a meaningful sentence without using a vowel. Especially, the letter ‘e’ is mostly used in any sentence. Now, Can you try to write a sentence without the letter ‘e’ ?
You’ll be amazed to know that, Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a complete novel in the year 1939 with the title ‘GADSBY’. It was a 50,000 word novel without the letter ‘e’, a lipogram.
A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided—usually a common vowel, and frequently E, the most common letter in the English language.
 
The plot revolves around the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalized as a result of the efforts of protagonist John Gadsby and a youth group he organizes.
The author said that the primary difficulty was to avoid all the ‘ed’ ending words like walked, talked etc. Instead he used ‘did walk’, ‘did talk’ and a few more like ‘Mr.’ for ‘Mister’ to avoid the letter ‘e’.
The author also turns famous sayings into lipogrammatic form. Instead of John Keats' "a thing of beauty is a joy forever" becomes "a charming thing is a joy always".


•	Many English words have changed their meaning over time - for example, awful used to mean inspiring wonder whereas nice used to mean silly.
•	The first English dictionary was written in 1755.
 
•	Tattarrattat is the longest palindrome in the English language, however, Guinness book of world record recognizes detartrated, the preterite and past participle of detartrate, a chemical term meaning to remove tartrates.
•	Eunoia, at six letters long, is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five main vowels. Seven letter words with this property include adoulie, douleia, eucosia, eulogia, Eunomia, eutopia, miaoued, moineau, sequoia, and suoidea.





The longest sentence in English literature contains 13,955 words.

It can be found in The Rotters' Club, a novel by Jonathan Coe.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Rott...

Reference: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/toda...





Ever wonder why there’s an extra ‘a’ at the end of some Hindi names when written in English: Rama, Ashoka, Chandragupta etc. ???
The simple answer to the question is this:
 
It is called ‘Schwa’.
So the logic is, in Sanskrit, when we take somebody’s name, there is a little ‘uh’ sound at the end. In English, ‘schwa’ represents this sound. It is always unstressed during pronunciation.
To account for this sound in English, different vowels are used at different places. Ex gratia, here the vowel ‘a’ is used.
The reason is that English, unlike Hindi or Sanskrit, does not contain Maatras. But it has a power of its own: Phonetics. The ‘schwa’ is a part of phonetics.



"Was it a car or a cat I saw" 
This sentence stays the same when read backwards. These type of sentences are known as palindromes.

A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward or forward.

Other examples are-
•	Do geese see God?
•	Was it Eliot's toilet I saw?
•	Murder for a jar of red rum.
•	Some men interpret nine memos.
•	Never odd or even.

•	Source-Wikipedia
•	http://www.fun-with-words.com/pa...

PS-Palindromes are present in other languages too.


 “Fjord bank cwm glyphs vext quiz.”
uses all the letters of the English alphabet once each. That is a notable achievement, because the English alphabet is seriously deficient in vowels (though somewhat deficient in consonants too).
In particular, “cwm” (an indentation in the side of a mountain) and “crwth” (a musical instrument similar to a harp but bowed) are the only two words that use only “w” as a vowel, so “cwm” is essential to the existence of this sentence.
AFAIK this is the only such sentence in English. I have seen another candidate, but it had abbreviations like TV and Ph.D.. This one has no abbreviations.
It makes good sense too. Since fjords and cwms are both formed by glaciation in mountains, fjord banks have plenty of cwms. Since cwms and glyphs (symbols carved into a stone surface) are both made of stone, a cwm is a logical place for glyphs. I am a quiz (an eccentric person, besides its more usual meaning), and have often been vext (puzzled and/or annoyed, British spelling) by glyphs in public places.
________________________________________
Offering correction to another answer, English has numerous words that contain all the vowels once each in alphabetical order. From Wiktionary, here they are:
•	abstemious
•	abstemiously
•	abstentious
•	acheilous
•	aerious
•	annelidous
•	arsenious
•	caesious
•	facetious
•	facetiously
•	fracedinous




We use the English language everyday (most of us). We communicate in it and also think in it. We learn new words and their meanings. Today you will learn two more new words: Autological and Heterological.
________________________________________
Do you ever think about the irony behind Non-Hyphenated?
Non-hyphenated means a word that is not hyphenated (self-explanatory), but the meaning of the world contradicts its structure, the word non-hyphenated contradicts its own meaning as it has a hyphen.
There are many such words in the English language, words that contradict their own meaning. Take the example of the word ‘Big’, the word’s structure is small, just three letters. The word Big is heterological.
Lets talk about autological words. An adjective is autological if it describes itself. The word ‘Meaningful’ is autological, so is the word ‘Pentasyllabic’ as it is pentasyllabic.

________________________________________
The Grelling-Nelson Paradox
Is the word ‘Heterological’ heterological? If your answer is no, then the word ‘heterological’ matches its meaning, which is not describing itself and hence it has to be autological.
But if it is autological then the word is antonymous to its meaning, then it has to be heterological.
That might be a bit perplexing and incomprehensible at first, but take sometime to understand it and it does form a paradox.
When we consider whether “autological” is an autological word, we find, not a paradox, but a tautology.
________________________________________
Auto-antonyms
An auto-antonym is a word that has two contradicting meanings. For example, the word ‘cleave’ can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together", ‘citation’ has two meanings “to award for good behavior” and “penalty for bad behaviour”. Things could get pretty confusing when you use these words without mentioning the intended meaning.
 
________________________________________
Autograms
An autogram is a sentence that provides a full inventory of its own characters. Lee Sallows composed this autogram, which was published in Metamagical Themas:
Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a’s, three b’s, four c’s, four d’s, forty-six e’s, sixteen f’s, four g’s, thirteen h’s, fifteen i’s, two k’s, nine l’s, four m’s, twenty-five n’s, twenty-four o’s, five p’s, sixteen r’s, forty-one s’s, thirty-seven t’s, ten u’s, eight v’s, eight w’s, four x’s, eleven y’s, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !








Adjectives in English are nearly always in this order: quantity - opinion - size - temperature - age - shape - color - origin - material - type - purpose. That’s why a tiny purple unicorn sounds better than a purple tiny unicorn. And a Chinese huge dragon isn’t nearly as frightening as a huge Chinese dragon.
This sounds so complicated, and yet every native English speaker uses this order instinctively. No one ever memorized this list, but mix it up and it sounds like broken English.


This one is a long read, and there is a video for the same.
English sure is a funny language.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation — think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough —
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!*
- George de Trenite



Oh, this one is told (rather asked) to me by someone years ago.
As we know English is a non phonetic language. There is a lot of confusion in spelling and pronunciation of words because the alphabets don't always relate to the same speech sounds. The fact I want to share is related to this only.
So the question is- How will you pronounce the word GHOTI?
Think something unusual.
.
.
OK, What if say it's FISH written here? Yes, I mean word FISH can also be written as GHOTI. Strange...?
Here is the explanation:
The word ghoti is intended to be pronounced in the same way as fish (/fɪʃ/), using these sounds:
1. gh, pronounced [f] as in enough [Iˈnʌf] or tough [tʌf];
2. o, pronounced [ɪ] as in women [ˈwɪmɪn];
and
3. ti, pronounced [ʃ] (sh) as in nation [ˈneɪ̯ʃən] or motion [ˈməʊʃən].
Don't you find interesting? :)



English is a crazy language. Don’t you agree?
It’s funny how, when we explore the paradoxes we find,
Quicksand can work slowly.
Guinea pigs are neither from Guinea nor pigs.
Boxing rings are square.
It’s crazy to know how english has evolved so much.
1.	There are seven ways to spell the sound ‘ee’ in English.
a.	This sentence contains all of them: ‘He believed Caesar could see people seizing the seas’.




English language has words that have unexpected origins. Here are a few of them:

BLATANT
What it means now: Completely lacking in subtlety; very obvious.
What it used to mean: A thousand-tongued beast from hell.
 
GEEK
What it means now: An unfashionable or socially inept person, or someone with an eccentric devotion to a particular interest (a computer geek).
What it used to mean: A circus sideshow freak.
 
HAZARD
What it means now: A danger or risk.
What it used to mean: A gambling game played with dice.
 
OSTRACIZE
What it means now: To exclude someone from a society or group.
What it used to mean: A government procedure to literally ban someone from Athens for ten years.
 
TOXIC
What it means now: Poisonous
What it used to mean: Greek archery.
 
VILLAIN
What it means now: A person guilty or capable of a crime or wickedness.
What it used to mean: A farm worker.
 
POOP
What it means now: Well, you know.
What it used to mean: An abrupt sound from a wind instrument.
 
QUARREL
What it means now: An angry argument or disagreement.
What it used to mean: A square-headed crossbow bolt.
 
SWASTIKA
What it means now: The symbol of the Nazi Party and the Third Reich.
What it used to mean: Well-being and good luck.
 
SABOTAGE
What it means now: Deliberately destroy, damage, or obstruct.
What it used to mean: To walk noisily wearing wooden shoes.






Have a look at these few sentences…
1.	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
2.	Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
3.	Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.
4.	Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
5.	The quick onyx goblin jumps over the lazy dwarf.
6.	How razorback-jumping frogs can level six piqued gymnasts.
Did you find anything common and unique about these sentences? No?
Actually these sentences are called pan-grams. Each of these six sentences containsevery letter of the alphabet at least once. That’s amazing , right ?
These sentences have been used by famous companies like windows XP and Adobe to display font samples. And the fourth sentence is used on NASA’s space shuttle.




I really found lots of interesting answers but no one mentioned the relation between the english language and numbers. So try this.
1.	Take any number, really any number. I choose 42 (life, universe and everything).
2.	Spell it out in English. Forty Two.
3.	Count the number of letters. 8, This is your new number.
4.	Repeat Steps 2 and 3.
No matter what number you choose, you will always end up at 4 (FOUR). FORTY TWO(8) -> EIGHT(5) -> FIVE(4)->FOUR(4)->FOUR(4). You can keep going on if you have nothing else to do.
Its really mind-blowing how the english language, something that human invented, can have these amazing patterns, with numbers (something that existed, just required themselves to be discovered).
Okay, take one more.
The first five numbers spelled out, when arranged alphabetically in order are:
Eight
Eight Billion
Eight Billion Eight
Eight Billion Eighteen
Eight Billion Eighteen Million
Ironically, the last one is Zero.
•	QUEUEING is the only word with five consecutive vowels in a row.
 




1.	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. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
2.	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?

1.	Many English speakers cannot differs between ‘précis' and ‘note' . also between ‘idioms' and ‘phrases'. Although it is simple.
2.	Some often confused words are “advice and advise”, “allusion and illusion”, “confidant and confident”, “disinterested and uninterested”, “canvas and canvass”. Try to differ. Even maximum textbooks have them too. But maximum confusing words in India is undoubtedly “principal and principle”. Interesting ! Even “suffix and prefix” , “synonyms and antonyms” also confuses beginners.
3.	You cannot differ some couple if words by pronunciation as “sight and site”, “seen and scene” they are called as ‘Homophones’.
4.	English is one of maximum test scheduling language as it is the most speaking language on the earth. Most exams ans tests conducted in English only. Also known as universal language.


10 Interesting Facts About the English Language that You Didn't Know.


1.	There was no punctuation until the 15th century!
2.	In England, in the 1880s, ‘pants’ was a dirty word.
3.	“Underground” is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters “und.







•	“I never said she stole my money.” This sentence has 7 different meanings depending on the stressed word. (Just an example)
•	The word Australia has 3 A’s and all are pronounced differently
•	Queue is the only word in English in which 80% of its letters are useless.
•	English can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.
•	If you replace W in Where, When and What with T, you answer the questions.
•	‘Lead’ rhymes with ‘Read’ but ‘Lead’ also rhymes with ‘Read’
•	The phrase ‘He told him that he heard him say he loved him’ can refer to anywhere from two to six people. Replace ‘say’ with ‘tell him’ and it goes up to seven.
•	We say in September, on Monday at 12 o’clock.

There are many words which have two contradicting meanings. They are called contranyms. Examples:
Sanction - which can mean both ‘a penalty for disobeying a law’ and ‘official permission or approval for an action’
Peruse – which can mean both ‘to look at or read something in an informal way’ and ‘to look at or read something in a very careful way’
Egregious – which can mean both ‘outstandingly bad’ and ‘remarkably good’
________________________________________
•	STARTLING - The only 9 letter word in the English language where you can remove one letter at a time and still create a word. Try it.
•	Acronyms are said like words, while initialisms are individual letters. For example, UNESCO is an acronym and FBI is an initialism.
•	Of all the words in the English language, the word ‘set’ has the most definitions. ‘Set’ has 464 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary.
________________________________________
English has alternating stress patterns that indicate whether related words are nouns (first syllable stressed) or verbs (second syllable stressed).
Noun: record, contract
Verb: record, contract



Following are some sentences which seem confusing and ridiculous but are technically accurate.
1. A ship-shipping ship shipping shipping ships.
 
3. Police police Police police police police Police police.
Police is a city in Poland. Three different forms of the same word come into play above: law enforcement (the noun), the city (an adjunct noun/adjective), and the verb.
Again, substituting the words to clarify the meaning - "patrol" for the verb form and "law enforcement" for the noun.
Law enforcement from Police (that) (other) law enforcement from Police patrol (also) patrol law enforcement from Police.
4. Can-can can-can can can can can can-can.
Can-can, the dance; can, a verb meaning "able"; and can, a second verb meaning to put in the trash, or euphemistically to outperform.
Can-can, the dance, that other can-can, the dance, are able to outperform are also able to outperform other examples of can-can, the dance.
5. Will, will Will will Will Will's will?
Will (a person), will (future tense helping verb) Will (a second person) will (bequeath) (to) Will (a third person) Will's (the second person) will (a document)?
Someone asked Will 1 directly if Will 2 plans to bequeath his own will, the document, to Will 3.
6. James, while John had had "had," had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.
A story accompanies this example.
Two students, James and John, were asked on an English test to describe a man who, in the past, had suffered from a cold. John wrote: "The man had a cold," which the teacher marked as incorrect. James, however, wrote: "The man had had a cold." Since James' answer was right, it had had a better effect on the teacher.
A few word substitutions and brackets to identify clauses will make this more clear.
James, (while John had written "had,") had written "had had"; "had had" had left a better effect on the teacher.
The double "had" - called past perfect tense - puts the action further back in time, suggesting that the man had had a cold but doesn't anymore.
7. Rose rose to put rose roes on her rows of roses.
Now, this sentence deals with homophones, words that sound the same with different meaning.
In this example, we have:
•	Rose, a woman.
•	rose, the verb meaning to get up.
•	rose, the flower.
•	rose, the color.
•	roes, the fish eggs (in this case, used as fertilizer).
•	rows, the lines.
A woman named Rose got up to put rose-colored fish eggs on her rows of roses.
8. If it is it, it is it; if it is it is it, it is.
This example has nothing to do with parts of speech or verb tense. Only massive substitutions can save us now.
If A is B, then B is C; If the idea is (that) A is C, then the idea is (correct).
9. That that exists exists in that that that that exists exists in.
The various forms of "that" affect this example, too. We'll switch the demonstrative adjective "that" with "this" and the relative pronoun "that" with "which." And when we have two examples of the verb "exist" next to each other, we'll change the second to "occur."
(The fact) that "that" exists occurs in a situation which this "that" exists (also) occurs in.
Essentially, the two different versions of "that" in this sentence, exist in some situation simultaneously.
10. Jim opens a cafe selling fish and chips. He has a sign made. It arrives and it says "fishandchips". So he rings up the sign company and says:
You need to put more space between fish and and and and and chips.
This one is fairly simple to understand. All you need to do is to put quotation marks between ‘fish’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘chips’.
So it becomes : You need to put more space between "fish" and "and" and "and" and "chips".


There is too much irregularity in English language. Don't you believe it? Let me prove it then.
Disclaimer: This is a very long poem and you can choose to skip 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 paragraphs :p. It will still prove the point.
________________________________________
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
________________________________________
If GH can stand for P, as in "Hiccough", 
If OUGH stands for O, as in "Dough"; 
if PHTH stands for T, as in "Phthisis"; 
if EIGH stands for A, as in "Neighbour"; 
f TTE stands for T, as in "Gazette"; 
if EAU stands for O, as in "Plateau"; 
Then, the right way to spell POTATO should be: GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU 
________________________________________
An interpreter's advice to the teacher 
In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compacted comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement, and asinine affectations. 
Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and veracious vivacity, without rodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity ventriloquial verbosity, and vaniloquent vapidity. Shun double-entendres, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurant or apparent!! And, don't teach with big words! 
________________________________________

Some new some read but all worth a second glance....

A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum. 
A farm can produce produce. 
A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line. 
After a number of injections my jaw got number. 
After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number. 
At the Army base, a bass was painted on the head of a bass drum. 
He could lead if he would get the lead out. 
How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend? 
I did not object to the object. 
I had to subject the subject to a series of tests. 
I shed a tear when I saw the tear in my clothes. 
I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt. 
Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
The bandage was wound around the wound.
The buck does funny things when the does are present. 
The dove dove into the bushes. 
The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse. 
The farm was used to produce produce.
The insurance was invalid for the invalid. 
The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
The wind was too strong to wind the sail. 
There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row. 
They sent a sewer down to stitch the tear in the sewer line. 
They were too close to the door to close it. 
To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow. 
Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
We must polish the Polish furniture. 
The present is a good time to present the present. 
When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France . Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

 And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?   If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

 If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?   In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?  How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? 
 How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell another. Have you noticed that we talk about certain things only when they are absent? Have you ever seen a horseful carriage or a strapful gown Met a sung hero or experienced requited love? Have you ever run into someone who was combobulated, gruntled, ruly or peccable? And where are all those people who ARE spring chickens or would ACTUALLY hurt a fly? 
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on.  Why is "crazy man" and insult, while to insert a comma and say, "crazy, man!" is a compliment (as when applauding a jazz performance.)

 English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.  Any way, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it. 



he Importance Of Correct Punctuation, Games Magazine (1984) 
Dear John: 
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we're apart. I can be forever happy--will you let me be yours? 
Gloria 
OR 
Dear John: 
I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you, I have no feelings whatsoever. When we're apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be? Yours, 
Gloria



Fat chance and slim chance mean the same thing. 
Flammable and inflammable mean the same thing. 
There is a whole collection of words called "Janus-faced" or "contronym" words. 
Examples: 
(source "Crazy English" by Richard Lederer) 
WITH: a) alongside b) against 
a) England fought with France against Germany. 
b) England fought with France. 
CLIP: a) fasten b) separate 
a) Clip the coupon to the newspaper 
b) Clip the coupon from the newspaper 
FAST: a) firmly in one place b) rapidly from on place to another 
a) The pegs held the test fast. 
b) She ran fast. 
BOLT: a) to secure in place b) to dart away 
a) I'll bolt the door. 
b) Did you see the horse bolt? 
TRIM: a) add things to b) cut away 
a) Let's trim the Christmas tree. 
b) Let's trim the hedge. 
DUST: a) remove material from b) spread material on 
a) Three times a week they dust the floor. 
b) Three times each season they dust the crops. 
WEATHER: a) withstand b) wear away 
a) Strong ships weather storms. 
b) Wind can weather rocks. 
HANDICAP: a) advantage b) disadvantage 
a) What's your handicap in golf? 
b) His lack of education is a handicap. 
COMMENCEMENT: a) beginning b) conclusion 
a) Beautiful weather marked the commencement of spring. 
b) She won an award at her high school commencement. 
HOLD UP: a) support b) hinder 
a) Please hold up the sagging branch. 
b) Accidents hold up the flow of traffic. 
KEEP UP: a) continue to fall b) continue to stay up 
a) The farmers hope that the rain will keep up. 
b) Damocles hoped that the sword above his head would keep up. 
LEFT: a) departed from b) remaining 
a) Ten people left the room 
b) Five people were left in the room. 
DRESS: a) put items on b) remove items from 
a) Let's dress for the ball 
b) Let's dress the chicken for cooking 
TEMPER: a) soften b) strengthen 
a) You must temper your anger with reason. 
b) Factories temper steel with additives. 
CLEAVE: a) separate b) adhere firmly 
a) A strong blow will cleave a plank in two. 
b) Bits of metal cleave to a magnet. 
STRIKE: a) secure in place b) remove 
a) Use a firm grip to strike the nail. 
b) When the show is over, we'll strike the set. 
GIVE OUT: a) produce b) stop producing 
a) A good furnace will give out enough energy to heat the house. 
b) A broken furnace will often give out. 
SANCTION: a) give approval of b) censure 
a) The NCAA plans to sanction the event 
b) Should our country impose a new sanction on Libya? 
SCREEN: a) view b) hide from view 
a) Tonight the critics will screen the film. 
b) Defensemen mustn't screen the puck. 
OVERSIGHT: a) careful supervision b) neglect 
a) The foreman was responsible for the oversight of the project. 
b) The foreman's oversight ruined the success of the project. 
QUALIFIED: a) competent b) limited 
a) The candidate for the job was fully qualified. 
b) The dance was a qualified success. 
MOOT: a) debatable b) not worthy of debate 
a) Capital punishment is a moot point. 
b) That the earth revolves around the sun is a moot point. 
CERTAIN: a) definite b) difficult to specify 
a) I am certain about what I want in life. 
b) I have a certain feeling about the plan. 
MORTAL: a) deadly b) subject to death 
a) The knight delivered a mortal blow. 
b) All humans are mortal. 
BUCKLE: a) fasten together b) fall apart 
a) Safe drivers buckle their sear belts. 
b) Unsafe buildings buckle at the slightest tremor of the earth. 
TRIP: a) to stumble b) to move gracefully 
a) Don't trip on the curb. 
b) Let's trip the light fantastic. 
PUT OUT: a) generate b) extinguish 
a) The candle put out enough light for us to see. 
b) Before I went to bed, I put out the candle. 
UNBENDING: a) rigid b) relaxing 
a) On the job Smith is completely unbending. 
b) Relaxing on the beach is a good way of unbending. 
WEAR: a) endure through use b) decay through use 
a) This suit will wear like iron. 
b) Water can cause mountains to wear. 
SCAN: a) examine carefully b) glance at hastily 
a) I scan the poem. 
b) Each day, I scan the want ads. 
FIX: a) restore b) remove part of 
a) It's time to fix the fence. 
b) It's time to fix the bull. 
SEEDED: a) with seeds b) without seeds 
a) The rain nourished the seeded field. 
b) Would you like some seeded raisins? 
CRITICAL: a) opposed b) essential to 
a) Joanne is critical of our effort 
b) Joanne is critical to our effort. 
THINK BETTER: a) admire more b) be suspicious of 
a) I think better of the first proposal than the second. 
b) If I were you, I'd think better of that proposal. 
TAKE: a) obtain b) offer 
a) Professional photographers take good pictures. 
b) Professional models take good pictures. 
IMPREGNABLE: a) invulnerable to penetration b) able to be impregnated 
a) The castle was so strongly built that it was impregnable. 
b) Treatments exist for making a childless woman more impregnable. 
BELOW PAR: a) excellent b) poor 
a) Her below par score won the golf tournament. 
b) I'm disappointed in you below par performance on the spelling test. 
DOWN HILL: a) adverse b) easy 
a) When the source of the capital dried up, the fortunes of the corporation went down hill. 
b) After you switch to diet drinks, it will be all down hill for your weight-loss program. 
WIND UP: a) start b) end 
a) I have to wind up my watch. 
b) Now I have to wind up this discussion of curious and contrary contronyms. 
- Stan Niles



If you've come this far, you must be interested, so don't complain to us if you get grossed out. Here is a list pulled off of a tasteless newsgroup and presented for you.
Here, for the grossly disoriented we have the definitive definition (from forman@cs.washington.edu):
/vomit/ v. spew out {or} up, spit up, belch forth; regurgitate, throw up, gag, retch, heave, {US} keck, {Colloq} puke, return (food), {Brit} sick up, {Slang chiefly Australian} chunder, {US} barf, upchuck, toss (one's) cookies, spiff (one's) biscuits
Oxford Thesaurus, Copyright 1991 Oxford Univ. Press
Vomit dictionary
A
abdominable voorheaves 
air the diced carrots (Gerd R., student.tuwien.ac.at)
alan's Psychedelic Breakfast (booda@navo.navy.mil)
animate throat-missles (mac1005.kip.apple.com)
anti-poop (mac1005.kip.apple.com)
arf (ddmodell@mailbox.syr.edu)


B
backwards bungee (slip200.sirius.com)
bad caugh (George Hau, mail.ast.cam.ac.uk)
barf
bark at ants
barking turkey (montan.dsava.com)
belch chasers (stei0302@cs.fredonia.edu)
big spit (newspig)
bit spit (garden.ucop.edu)
blanch (absolut.osf.org)
blevis (slip21.uniserve.com)
blow
blow beets
blow bile (tbyte.com)
blow breakfast
blow chow
blow chowder (aurp1a.aur.alcatel.com)
blow chunks
blow cookies (bongo.bos.locus.com)
blow din-din
blow doughnuts
blow foam
blow groceries
blow lunch
blow your eats (slip141.tus.primenet.com)
blue chip special (mark_brittell@omis.edu)
bhluuuugh (?)
boke
boot
boot camp 
bow down before the porcelain god
bowel backup (emcindoo@stimpy.acofi.edu)
brack
bring it up for a vote
brown-nose it
buick 
burping bits (PJ Lindsay)
buy my buick

C
cack (Jeff Gerstmann)
call buicks
call dinosaurs
call for huey
call the elephants (infoserv.utdallas.edu)
call to the seals (arrrrrr aaarrrrrrrrrr)
call uncle ralph
call ralph on the big white telephone (Dan Tasman)
calling jacob (dglass@inmind.com)
carl earl (tbyte.com)
call (by telphone) the holy Urlich (the sound made while vomiting) (carljk@algonet.se)
catch it on the rebound
chandu (rchandra%hss@lando.hns.com)
Cheektowaga scream (Dan Tasman)
chuck a pizza
chuckle (regmap2.dme.nt.gov.au)
chum (Aaron, buccaneer.snm.com)
chunder
chunderspew
chunderspew
clean house
clearing your throat the easy way (rap@hooked.net)
churn (avon.x.co.uk)
commode hugging
cookin' for the cafeteria (lemma.res.jhu.edu)
copiously cough one's cookies (tbyte.com)
coughing chunks (next30-17.dev.oclc.org)
curl and hurl (tbyte.com)

D
decorate pavement
deliver street pizza
den heiligen Ulrich anrufen (carljk@algonet.se)
disgorge
divulge dinner
don ho heave (cuchulainn.stsci.edu)
drain the main
dribble phlem
drive the porcelain bus
drop chowder (Ilsae@echonyc.com)
dry boke
dump core (montan.dsava.com)

E
earl 
eating backwards (Tom Silva)
effusing the night's excess (tbyte.com)

F
facial diarrhea (Adam_Fukushima@engr.arc.nasa.gov)
fecal burp (Rich Haddock, novell.com)
feed the birds (pc101.siba.fi)
feed the fish, ducks
feed the houseplants
feed your young
fertilize the sidewalk
fill up the Tory swimming pool (George Hau, mail.ast.cam.ac.uk)
fling floor pie (chardonnay.harvard.edu)
food escape! (Dave @derby.ac.uk)
food flight (onet2.cup.hp.com)
fubar (voon.ee.cooper.edu)

G
gack
gag
get a refund on your lunch (jayg@sccsi.com)
give an oral sacrifice at the altar of the porcelain god
go to europe with ralph and earl in a buick
growling splash monkey (hale-mac36.wa.com)

H
hack it out (hake.cs.washington.edu)
hack'n bile (hake.cs.washington.edu)
hack some stew (veloce.pica.army.mil)
have a school lunch rerun (e8925292@student.tuwien.ac.at)
ham hawking (PJ Lindsay)
hawk (garden.ucop.edu)
heave 
heccccchluuug (Gary Love, raven.csrv.uidaho.edu)
hiccup from hell (mdexter.tiac.net)
hock up a furball (krypton.che.ilstu.edu)
honk (dave_oshea@wiltel.com)
hooverin' (Jeff Meade)
horfing it up (170.110.200.124)
hork
huey
hug the porcelain wishing well
hurl
hurling projectile material with or without chunks (ELLEN HANRAHAN)

I
induce antiperistalsis
inverse gut
involuntary personal protein spill

J
jump shot

K
kissing the can (Brent Sonnek-Schmelz) 
kotsen/kotzen (oscar@gewis.win.tue.nl) 
kneel before the porcelain throne

L
lap lung butter (ceth.princeton.edu)
lateral cookie toss
laugh at the carpet
laugh at the lawn
laugh at your shoes (voon.ee.cooper.edu)
launch lunch
leave lunch
liquid laugh
liquid scream
liquidate your assets
look for o'rourke
lose flourescent christmas cheer
lose some chopped carrots
lose weight
lose your lunch
lunch
lurch (cha.j.y%wec@dialcom.tymnet.com)

M
make a (technicolor) tribute to disney
make an offering to the porcelain god
make chowder (tbyte.com)
make a crustless pizza (greg@illustra.com)
make food offerings to the china gods
make pavement asterisks (perogy.cs.umanitoba.ca)
make the oatmeal hit the wall (dmiller.prentrom.com)
meet my friends ralph and earl
mug the hurpey (laser.2@osu.edu)
multi-colored yawn (Bob Torres, tsppp10.cac.psu.edu)

N
negative chug

O
offer a sacrifice to ralph, the porcelain god
order buicks over the big white phone
organ recital (c00805-247dan.eos.ncsu.edu)
organic output
out of stomach experience (regmap2.dme.nt.gov.au)

P
parbreake
pavement pizza
paint one's trousers (194.20.36.52)
paint the back seat (voon.ee.cooper.edu)
park a tiger (dcrodjers.bt-sys.bt.co.uk)
park a buick (jax.jaxnet.com)
plant beets
play the whale (regmap2.dme.nt.gov.au)
pop a gastric zit (tbyte.com)
porcelain projectiles (Ken Williamson)
pour one's overindulgence (tbyte.com)
povracati (ivana@mit.edu)
power barf
power boot
pray at the porcelain altar
pray to the porcelain goddess
pray to the porcelain gods 
praying to the porcelain princess
preach it to the congregation (batespc1.interbase.borland.com)
prepare dinner for a racist (George Hau, mail.ast.cam.ac.uk)
projectile style (garden.ucop.edu)
protein spill
psychadelic spit
puke

Q
quake one's gizzard (tbyte.com)
quease (tbyte.com)

R
rainbow fountain (ddmodell@mailbox.syr.edu)
rainbow kiss (bonkers.neosoft.com)
regurgitate
ralph
read the toilet
recycle your lunch (stei0302@cs.fredonia.edu)
regurgitate
retch
return the tripe (n.jacklin@hud.ac.uk)
reverse diarrhea
reverse drink
reverse gears
reverse gut
reverse peristalsis
ride the regurgitron
rope på elgen --- Norwegian: call the moose (wikne@lynx.uio.no)
round trip meal ticket

S
screaming at the ants (192.215.42.2)
scream cookies
sell a buick
sell cars (fooooorrrrd!!! buuuuuuiiiccccckkkk! hyuuuundai!!!!)
shaq-fu (sparky)
shout at your shoes
shout europe at the sink
shouting to Huey and Ralph
shunder (sean@vinny.csd.mu.edu)
shpew (ts3-30.upenn.edu)
sing lunch
sing psychedelic praises to the depths of the china bowl
sing to the sink
slam barf
snarf (aka: vomit via nasal passages) (veloce.pica.army.mil)
sneeze cheeze
sneeze chunks
soul coughing (netcom2.netcom.com)
spew
spew chunks (Matthew, snm.com)
spew snacks
spew spuds
spew the wild oats (ronald.tozzie@industry.net)
spill the groceries
spill your life story (sunlab45.essex.ac.uk)
spit cheese (tbyte.com)
splash your hash (ttacs3.ttu.edu)
split pea spew (slagdor@crl.com)
stomach overflow error (wsbusup4@urc.tue.nl)
sprout (rum.ee.umanitoba.ca)

T
talk to god on the big white telephone
talk to huey down the big white telephone.
talk to john on the porcelain telephone
talk to ralph on the big white telephone
talk to rrraaalllfffff on the camode-a-phone
talk to the carpet
talk to your shoes (Jeff Gerstmann)
taste dinner
tastes even better the second time (trentu.ca)
taste lunch twice (Jjperry@cs.ucla.edu)
technicolor yawn 
technicolor yodel
the big spit
the brooklyn mating call
the jersey yodel
throw dinner
throw up (voter-classroom-ethernet-11.middlebury.edu)
throw your voice (regmap2.dme.nt.gov.au)
thunder-chunder rainbow parfait
toilet bowl love (Brent Sonnek-Schmelz) 
toss your cookies
toss your tacos
turn your guts inside out (silva) 
tuna salad swimming upstream (cithe308.cithep.caltech.edu) 

U
uebergeben (tar_ddkc@aix1.danadata.dk)
uke (from my husband,bill @ kitkat.admin.utk.edu)
ulrik (tar_ddkc@aix1.danadata.dk)
un-eat
upchuck

V
vector-spew
visible burp (mitchell@ug.cs.dal.ca)
vomit

W
warhol wail (kburchil@gtis.gc.ca)
waste good beer (zeus.cooper.edu)
whistling beef (skeezics@teleport.com)
wolf
woof 
worf (BucsknBrns@aol.com)
worship at the porcelain altar
worship the porcelain god
worhip ralph at the great procelain throne (George Dorn)
wretch 
wyatt erp (cuchulainn.stsci.edu)

Y
yak
yark (Shan)
yatch 
yawn for the hearing impaired (micro5.microbiol.washington.edu)
yeech
yell at the ground
yell for hughie
yodel (ntssun2.ug.eds.com)
york
yorkel (phobos.rm.fccc.edu)
yorp (lan10.ec-nantes.fr)
yuke


















 PS. - Why doesn't 'Buick' rhyme with 'quick'?

Some more in the English language to enjoy.

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is 'UP.'

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?
·         At a meeting, why does a topic come UP?
·         Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?
·         We call UP our friends.
·         And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver; we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen.
·         We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.
 At other times the little word has real special meaning.
·         People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.
·         To be dressed is one thing, but to be dressed UP is special.
·         A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.
·         We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.
·      ... (more)



20. The longest English word with its letters in reverse alphabetical order is spoonfeed.
21. Shakespeare used the word puking in As You Like It.
23. Bamboozle derives from a French word, embabouiner, meaning “to make a baboon out of someone.”
25. The shortest -ology is oology, the scientific study of eggs.
26. As a verb rather than a noun, owl means “to act wisely, despite knowing nothing.”
29. Noon is derived from the Latin for “ninth,” novem. It originally referred to the ninth hour of the Roman day — 3pm.



3. 'Scraunched' is the longest English word with one syllable.
Along with the archaic word 'strengthed'. Scraunch is the sound your car makes on gravel.
4. The phrase 'long time no see' is a literal translation of a Chinese phrase.
It comes from the Mandarin phrase 'hao jiu bu jian'. 'No go' and 'no can do' are also similarly borrowed from Chinese.
5. The word 'startling' is the only nine letter word in English where you can remove one letter at a time to create another word.
7. The motto on the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdoms is in French!
It says "Dieu et mon droit" or "God and my right"
8. Every year, around a thousand new words are added to the Oxford English 
9. 'Oxyphenbutazone' is the highest scoring word in a game of scrabble.
Although, it's only hypothetical and hasn't been played EVER. But hey, maybe you'll be the first one to use it!
10. 'Twyndyllyng' is the longest word in the English language without any vowels.
It's an obsolete word pronounced "twinlin" meaning twins. A more commonly word though, is ' rhythms ' .
13. The word 'abstemious' has all the vowels in the alphabetical order.
Other such words include abstentious, aerious, arsenious and facetious.



I posted this in answer to another question. It’s not originally mine, butI find it pretty funny.
“So you want to learn English, do you? Good bloody luck with that. It's the only language on earth that has no hard and fast rules. Every rule has an exception. Every. Single. One.
We can't decide how many vowels there are. A, E, I, O, and U... oh, and sometimes Y. Spelling a word? Remember, it's I before E, except after C and when it says "AY" as in "neighbour" and "weigh". Yet that little rhyme doesn't explain the words "weird", "counterfeit", "feisty", "caffeine", and "foreign". And is it always "ei" after C? Nope. "Ancient" and "glacier" are just two of many exceptions.
Nouns and verbs? They're ambiguous. You can sit on a chair while you chair a meeting. You can table a suggestion while sitting at the table. Worse, you can sit in a chair at the meeting while you table the bill on the table because you're the chair of the meeting.
I can pencil you in on my calendar with a pen. I can pen a poem using a pencil. I can cup some beans with my hands and deposit them in a cup... and so on.
What about "ough"? What sound do those letters make in English? Many, but I haven't thought it through enough, though... *cough*
You park in a driveway and you drive in a parkway. When you wind up a watch, you start it, but when you wind up a speech you end it. But when you wind up your friend, you've played a prank on them.
There's no egg in an eggplant. A pineapple contains neither pines nor apples. People recite at a play and play at a recital. You fill in a form by filling it out. When the stars are out you can see them but when the lights are out you can't see anything. A house burns up as it burns down. Only in English would a slim chance and fat chance mean the same thing.
Don't get me started on plurals.
One goose, two geese. One moose, two moose.
One mouse, two mice. One house, two houses.
One tooth, two teeth. One booth, two booths.
No. Sense. Whatsoever.
Fish oil comes from a fish, palm oil comes from a palm, but baby oil doesn't come from a baby.
In England, there's a place called Gloucester. How would you pronounce that? You'd sound it out using English rules and probably say "gloo-kess-ter" and you'd be wrong. It's pronounced "Gloss-ter".
The "ch" can make a "cha" sound, like in the word "cheese", or it can be a "k" sound, like it does at the end of "stomach".
What ridiculous language puts a silent "p" at the beginning of the word "psychology"? What is the point of that? Who thought it would be a good idea to make "abbreviation" such a long word? Why are "apartments" close together? Shouldn't they be apart?
Or - even worse - how cruel of a language puts an "s" in the word "lisp"?”



If you’ve ever played scrabble you will understand that Q is a tricky letter. To use a Q in the game, a player must also find an available U.
Ever wondered why almost all English words starting with ‘Q’ , actually begin with ‘Qu’ ?
In English QU is always used as a digraph (a pair of letters representing a single speech sound) for the sound /kw/ (a voiceless labiovelar stop). Q’s pairing with U is a Latin invention that has its origin in Greek. The letter Koppa, which Q is based on, would appear before a rounded vowel where otherwise a sound like /k/ or /g/ would be used. But a few other letters, like C, also designated the same sound but in different letter combinations. As C gradually came to represent more and more of these instances, Q became primarily dependent on U to express any sound at all. This is quite a quibble for a full-fledged member of the Latin (now English) alphabet.
Q without U is used to represent sounds not often found in English but typical in Semitic languages. Loan words such as Quran and Iraq are examples of Q’s guttural /k/ sound.
Q’s shape may have its origin in the Egyptian hieroglyph for a cord of wool, pronounced “qaw.” The symbol of a circle with a descending line was used in the Greek Koppa and is similar to the shape of the basic modern Latin character you see on your keyboard.
Speaking of keyboards, QWERTY is one of the few English words that does not have a U directly following the Q.
Here’s a challenge for you: think of an English word starting with ‘Q’ without an ‘u’ following.



Ever wonder why is ch in Chemistry is differently pronounced from ch in Chair.
That’s because English language borrowed many words from different languages
 
Image source: words borrowed by english (Google)
And however the words are pronounced in that language for a borrowed word, the same pronunciation is adopted for English word.
Like for ‘ch’ in 'chip', 'chord' or ‘charade’.
These two letters (ch), when put together, make different sounds because ‘chip’, ‘chord’, and ‘charade’ originate from three different languages.
A large chunk of English language originates from Latin. These consist mainly of words that have prefixes, roots, and suffixes, such as 'attractive' ('at' is the prefix, meaning 'to', 'toward', 'tract' is the root, meaning 'to pull', and 'ive' is the suffix, meaning 'causing', 'making'). In essence, the word ‘attractive’ means ‘causing to pull toward’. ‘Chord’, mentioned in my above example, is also Latin.
Yet another language that we get some of our English words from is Greek. Many of our math and science words are Greek, such as ‘photosynthesis’ and ‘graph’ (‘ph’ is a Greek grapheme).
Then there are the languages that we "dip" from. Some of English words, such as musical terms, are Italian. Some other words are borrowed from French (‘charade’) andSpanish. See below:
 
Image Source:The Many Layers of the English Language
Thus, we have different pronunciations for the same letter combinations…
:)



1. Shakespeare invented half the words he used.
OK, not half, but a lot. “Assassinate,” “besmirch,” “impartial,” “worthless,” “grovel,” “mimic,” “noiseless”—all these and more didn’t exist before Shakespeare decided to lump them together for the sake of fitting his iambic pentameter. Thanks a lot, Shakespeare, for besmirching the dignity of our mother tongue. 
  
 3. Old English is unreadable. 
 
 Not just because it’s boring. It’s literally unreadable. (I’m using “literally” in its original definition, by the way.) Don’t believe me? Then check out this randomly selected passage from the epic poem “Beowulf”:
 
HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas, syððanærest wearð
feasceaft funden.



English is a crazy language.
 There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither
apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France.
 
Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted.
 
But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. 

Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? 
 
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
 
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm goes off by going on.
 
English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out,they are invisible. 





I find English an interesting language especially when it comes to the study of the origin of its words - Etymology. Let me tell you one interesting story. It’s a short read, so go ahead!
Ancient Romans had an instrument called a hodometer (or “road measurer”) installed in the back of their taxis. This instrument had a tin can with a revolving cover that held a number of pebbles. The can was so designed that each time the wheel turned, the metal cover also revolved and a pebble dropped through a hole into a container/vessel below. At the end of a trip, the pebbles are counted and the bill is calculated. You see, the Latin word for pebble is calculus ! That’s where the word “calculate” comes from. So, the next time you say calculate or any of the various words in its family, remember you are actually referring to a stone. :P
The word companion also has a funny root. In Latin, “cum” means “with” and “panis” means “bread.” So, companion simply means one who has bread with you! Be sure to share a sandwich with someone the next time you refer to them as your companion!
Another engaging aspect of the English language is its constantly changing nature. Again, an anecdote best illustrates this.
King George the First of England complimented Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St.Paul’s Cathedral in London upon completion of his magnificent masterpiece. He told Wren that his work was “amusing, awful and artificial.”
Yes, I wrote that right and you read it right because three hundred years ago, amusing meant amazing, awful meant awe-inspiring and artificial meant artistic !! This is a particularly compelling example of how drastically the meanings of words change with time because each of those three words has now come to mean almost the exact opposite!
Source: I came across these interesting facts in “30 days to a more powerful vocabulary” by Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis. A definitely recommended read for vocabulary enthusiasts.





•	“This exceeding trifling witling, considering ranting criticising concerning adopting fitting wording being exhibiting transcending learning, was displaying, notwithstanding ridiculing, surpassing boasting swelling reasoning, respecting correcting erring writing, and touching detecting deceiving arguing during debating,” is a completely grammatically correct sentence, that actually means, “This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate.”
•	Floccinaucinihilipilification, the declaration of an item being useless, is the longest non-medical term in the English language.
•	There is a seven-letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, “therein” can generate: “the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein”.
•	The widow is the only female form of a root word in the English language that is shorter than its corresponding male term (widower).
•	There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs five times: “indivisibility.”
•	The word “queue” is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed.
•	 “Dreamt” and its derivatives are the only common English words that end in “mt”.
•	The word “Typewriter” can be typed using only the top row of keys on the keyboard.



Words with long consonant clusters are: angsts, twelths, bursts and glimpsed, but the word that has the longest consonant cluster in English (although it is a proper noun) is Knightsbridge.



Perhaps you’ve heard of the infamous “buffalo” sentence with eight “buffalo”. In case you haven’t, here it is:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Roughly, it means that there are three groups of bison/buffalo in the city of Buffalo. Group A, who is bullied by Group B, in turn bullies group C.
However
What’s more interesting is that, with a combination of group theory and sentence diagramming, it can be proven that any number of “buffalos” can be strung together to form a grammatically correct sentence (with proper capitalization and punctuation).
For instance, the single word sentence “Buffalo!” is the imperative sentence with an implied “you”, commanding the listener to bully others.
The two-word sentence “Buffalo buffalo” is a statement that bison are known to bully others.
And so on.
The number eight was simply selected as the simplest case that sufficiently demonstrated the particular absurdities of English grammar.
Edit: As someone pointed out in the comments, bison and buffalo are not interchangeable terms. A Buffalo is an alternate name for the American bison, one of two bison species. I won’t be changing the answer itself though, since I think the use of bison in parts elucidates the different usages of buffalo.



8. ‘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!
11.‘Pronunciation’ is the word which is most mispronounced in the English language!



Once in Yale University, USA, a native speaker of English asked Anna a tricky question: Can you construct a sentence in English by using because at least two times in it?
The instantaneous response from Dr. C. N. Annadurai was ” No sentence ends in because, because, because is a conjunction”




Implausibly Grammatical Sentences


One Morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.

Take advantage of the fact that the same sentence can have two different structures. This famous joke from Groucho Marx assumes that most people expect the structure of the part to be :-

One morning [I shot an elephant] [in my pajamas]

But another possible,and perfectly grammatical, reading is

One Morning [I Shot] [an Elephant in my Pajamas]



"This exceeding trifling witling, considering ranting criticizing concerning adopting fitting wording being exhibiting transcending learning, was displaying, notwithstanding ridiculing, surpassing boasting swelling reasoning, respecting correcting erring writing, and touching detecting deceiving arguing during debating."



This sentence takes advantage of the versatile English –ing. The author of a 19th century grammar guide lamented the fact that one could "run to great excess" in the use of –ing participles "without violating any rule of our common grammars," and constructed this sentence to prove it. It doesn't seem so complicated once you realize it means :-

"This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate"

Not only is this a great example of the wonderful crazy things you can do within the bounds of proper English, it's the perfect response to pull out the next time someone tries to criticize your grammar ;)


Sources :

http://m.mentalfloss.com/article...



19. The oldest word in the English language is 'town'.
20. The word 'Strengths' is the longest word in the English language with just one vowel.
21. The past tense for the English word 'dare' is 'durst'.



CHICKHOOD and OXOIODIDE are also horizontally symmetrical words, and they have 9 letters too.

You can find many other horizontally symmetrical terms (mostly proper nouns and abbreviations) at

http://www.omnilexica.com/lists/...




1.	 ‘Tmesis” is the only english word starts with ‘Tm’ .
2.	“Aegilops” is the longest english word which arranged alphabetically, it refers a type of grass. Source : Different website



I think the most interesting fact is its evolution. The roots of English go to the West Germanic languages and dialects brought over by the Saxons and other tribes which settled there after the departure of the Romans, with Late West Saxon becoming predominant.

The most significant linguistic "shift" occurred with the Norse invasions of the 10th and 11th centuries. With large numbers of Norse speakers living side by side with Anglo-Saxons, and subsequent trade and intermarriage, a "pidgin" developed which combined words from both, but more importantly led to a decline in the use of inflectional grammar. The language which emerged from this -- Middle English -- was a "creole" of Anglo-Saxon with Norse and Norman French substrates, more reliant on word order, and more flexible.

Middle and Modern English has demonstrated a high propensity for adapting "loanwords" from other languages, especially Latin and Ancient Greek. And finally, the widespread settlement of English speakers around the globe has led to increased divergence in variations, with American and British English contending for dominance, but also Indian, Australian and other forms.





The history of English is a history of adaptability. One may go as far as to say that English is currently the only "glocal" language, which belongs to everybody, and yet, curiously enough, belongs to no one in particular! That, in essence is why English is truly amazing!

1) A glocal language is one which is global at the same time as it is highly localized. The English spoken in Britain varies considerably with the English spoken in USA or Australia. The dialectic variation in English from region to region indicates a rich tapestry of interaction, cultural and linguistic with lands far spread and cultures exotic. On a local level, the English spoken in Wales shares not much in common with the English spoken in say, Scotland or the lowlands. In India, English dialects vary along with the native tongue spoken by the person, spawning Hinglish (Hindi+English) or Tenglish (Telugu+English) or Bonglish (Bengali+English). Perhaps no other language lends itself so well to such a synthesis with other languages. Goes without saying, that this is the reason for the world's love affair with English.

There is also a reverse synthesis at play here. English is uniquely flexible in absorbing words from other languages and giving them a distinctly English flavor, sometimes bearing little resemblance to the original word. Right from the Norman quest bringing in an influx of French - influenced changes to the days of the 'Empire', English has thrived on foreign vocabulary, deriving a unique pleasure in poaching words from other languages, fashioning them in its own mould. An example is juggernaut (which is Hindi/Oriya is Jagannath, literally meaning "Lord of the World), which in English means an unstoppable phenomenon. (An unmistakable reference to the procession of the Lord Jagannath mentioned before, in the chariot-festival)!! This ability of English to incorporate foreign words and imbue them with a meaning uniquely English in nature automatically means English becomes an expressive, potent mode of communication in vastly different locations and scenarios. 

2) After all who is a native speaker of English? A person born into a family speaking the tongue? By that definition, I am a native speaker of English! A person who studies, thinks and interacts primarily in English? By that definition, I am native speaker of English! Or does it mean a person whose "mother tongue" is English in the sense that he/she is native to mainly English speaking countries? In that sense, I am not a native speaker of English. Is it a person who speaks the language with grammatical precision? In that case, many conventionally "native" speakers aren't quite the native speakers of the language!

This is the beauty of the identity construct of an "English speaker". The inherent complexity in adjudicating right from wrong, in defining what English is and isn't, makes English the language it is now: a language of the world and of the individual, and a truly unique one at that!




3.The word "mortgage"comes from a French word that means"death contract".


6.Screeched is the longest English word with one syllable.

7.Until the 19th century the English word for actors was "hypocrites".


10.The day after tomorrow is called"Overmorrow".



Yes, English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought though!




there are words called ‘contronyms’ that have 2 opposite meanings like sanction meaning allowed or impose a penalty on…..you can be sanctioned for an activity, make a mistake & have sanctions placed on you
dust means either to clean or what you are cleaning off…..you dust the dust off the furniture
fast is another that has multiple meanings, you can hold fast (stay), go fast (move quickly), fast also means to not eat……..you are in a race but you hold fast at the red light, then when it turns green you go fast but speed makes you vomit so you fast all day in preparation
off (my personal fave) means opposite of on but also off i.e. I turned the alarm off but it went off anyways
left means either remaining or departed….the men have left for after-dinner cigars & the women are left
flammable & inflammable mean the exact same thing




Isn’t English a Funny Language??
There is no egg in eggplant or ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple...
Is cheese the plural of choose?
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
In what language do people recite at a play, and play at a recital?
Ship by truck, and send cargo by ship?
Have noses that run and feet that smell?
Park on driveways and drive on parkways? (My favorite)
Sweetmeats are candies, while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.
We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write, but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce, and hammers don't ham? 
If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth?
One goose, 2 geese. So, one moose, 2 meese?
One index, two indices? 
How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell another?
When a house burns up, it burns down. 
You fill in a form by filling it out, and an alarm clock goes off by going on.
When the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.
And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it?
English muffins were not invented in England or French fries in France.
How can 'slim chance and a fat chance' be the same, while ' wise man and a wise guy' are opposites?
Why do they call them apartments when they're all together? 
Why do we call them buildings, when they're already built? 
Why it is called a TV set when you get only one? 
Why is phonetic not spelled phonetically? 
Why is it so hard to remember how to spell mnemonic? 
Why doesn't onomatopoeia sound like what it is? 
Why is the word abbreviation so long? 
Why is diminutive so undiminutive? 
Why does the word monosyllabic consist of five syllables?
Now I know why I failed in english.
It's not my fault but the silly language doesn't quite know whether it's coming or going




The power of english lies solely in the punctuation.
1. 	Let’s eat grandma
Let’s eat, grandma
2. 	A woman, without her man, is nothing
A woman: without her, man is nothing
3. 	Help your uncle jack off the horse
Help your Uncle Jack off the horse









Probably we use tons of expressions, idioms,and slang phrases every day that don’t make literal sense. Some English expressions are so crazy and unusual that it is impossible to guess where on earth it originated from — unless we know the history.
1.Bite the bullet: To accept something difficult or unpleasant.
Origin:In the olden days, when doctors were short on anesthesia or time during a battle, they would ask the patient to bite down on a bullet to distract from the pain.
2. Break the ice: To break off a conflict or commence a friendship.
Origin:Back when ships were the only transportation and means of trade. At times, they would get stuck during the winter because of ice formation. The receiving country would send small ships to “break the ice” to clear a way for the trade ships. This gesture showed affiliation and understanding between two territories.
3. Butter someone up: To impress someone with flattery
Origin:This was a customary religious act in ancient India. The devout would throw butter balls at the statues of their gods to seek favor and forgiveness.
4. Mad as a hatter: To be completely crazy
Origin: In 17th century France, poisoning occurred among hat makers who used mercury for the hat felt. The “Mad Hatter Disease” was marked by shyness,irritability, and tremors that would make the person appear “mad.”
5. Cat got your tongue: Asked to a person who is at loss of words
Origin: In ancient Egypt, where liars’ and blasphemers’ tongues were cut out and fed to the cats. (What a treat for the cats!)
6. Barking up the wrong tree: To have wrong thoughts about a situation, a false lead.
Origin:This refers to hunting dogs that may have chased their prey up a tree. The dogs bark, assuming that the prey is still in the tree, when the prey is no longer there.
7. Turn a blind eye: To ignore situations,  facts, or reality
Origin:The British Naval hero, Admiral Horatio Nelson, had one blind eye. Once when the British forces signal for him to stop attacking a fleet of Danish ships, he held up a telescope to his blind eye and said, “I do not see the signal.” He attacked, nevertheless, and was victorious.
8. Bury the hatchet: To stop a conflict and make peace
Origin:In North America when the Puritans were in conflict with the Native Americans.When negotiating peace, the Native Americans would bury all their hatchets,knives, clubs, and tomahawks. Weapons literally were buried and made inaccessible.
9. Give a cold shoulder: Being unwelcoming or antisocial toward someone.
Origin:In medieval England, it was customary to give a guest a cold piece of meat from the shoulder of mutton, pork, or beef chop when the host felt it was time for the guest to leave. This was a polite way to communicate, “You may leave, now.”
10. Go the whole nine yards: To try your best at something
Origin:During World War II, the fighter pilots were equipped with nine yards of  When they ran out, it meant that they had tried their best at fighting off the target with the entirety of their ammunition.
11. Letone’s hair down: To relax or be at ease
Origin:In public, the aristocratic women of medieval times were obliged to appear inelegant hair-dos that were usually pulled up. The only time they would “let their hair down” was when they came home and relaxed.



    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").



Considering the purpose of language is to communicate, English can be incredibly ambiguous. You've seen some great examples already - but my all time favourite sentence in English is a short sentence that has a huge number of potential different meanings:

Time Flies Like an Arrow
 (Fruit flies like a banana)

Groucho Marx aside, just see if you can try to work out the 11 different meanings of the sentence "Time flies like an arrow" - it's a challenge. For example...

1. Time flies the same way as an arrow flies
2. Time escapes/ flees like an arrow
3. Time flies (a species of fly) enjoy a particular arrow
4. Time flies (a species of fly) generally like an arrow
5. Time flies (a species of fly) prefer an arrow (e.g. Fruit flies like a bullet, but time-flies like an arrow)
6. The time flies which are similar to an arrow...
7. Get a timer, and time the flies that resemble an arrow
8. Get a timer, and time flies like you would time an arrow
9. Get a timer, and time flies like you're an arrow/ like an arrow would time flies
10. Get a timer, and time flies quickly (as fast as an arrow)
11. Time magazine flies like an arrow would fly
12. Time (magazine company) is fleeing like an arrow

What a lot for a small sentence to accomplish!

Most of the people are not aware of paraprosdokian in the English language.
Paraprosdokian are figures of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected; frequently humorous. Here are a few examples. Enjoy!!
1. Where there's a will, I want to be in it.
2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it's still on my list.
3. Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
4. If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong.
5. We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.
6. War does not determine who is right - only who is left. (My favourite!)
7. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit . . . Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
8. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.
9. I didn't say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you.
10. In filling out an application, where it says, 'In case of emergency, Notify:' I put 'DOCTOR'.
11. Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are sexy .
12. You do not need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.
13. I used to be indecisive. Now I'm not so sure.
14. To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.
15. Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a mechanic.
16. You're never too old to learn something stupid.
17. I'm supposed to respect my elders, but its getting harder and harder for me to find one now.





Mr. Rahul Sinha and Mr. Manasbrata has cited the example of a sentence, which contains all the 26 alphabets of English language : 
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" (35 characters)
AND
"Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs"  (32 characters)

But the shortest english sentence with all alphabets is:
"The five boxing wizards jump quickly"(31 characters)



Some plurals-
Man- Men but Pan- Pans and not Pen.
Box- Boxes but Ox- Oxen and not Oxes.
Mouse-Mice but House- houses and not Hice.
Foot-Feet but Boot-Boots and not beet.
Tooth-teeth but Booth is not beethe.

In the masculine form its he, his and him
But in the feminine its not she, shis and shim but she and her.


________________________________________
Can can can can can can can can can can. ("Examples of the can-can dance that other examples of the same dance are able to outshine, or figuratively to put into the trashcan, are themselves able to outshine examples of the same dance". It could alternatively be interpreted as a question, "Is it possible for examples of the dance that have been outshone to outshine others?" or several other ways.)



Do you know the meaning of Government - to govern the policies ?but latin meaning is Government'. The word 'Government' comes from the Latin verb gubernare means "to control," and the Latin noun means "mind" -so mind control
What is the meaning of Doctor - one who treats ill people ,doctoring means falsifying .so why the contrary meanings created here


Verbs are often pronounced with stress on the second syllable.
Nouns are pronounced with stress on the first syllable.
1.) 	REfuse ( Garbage )
reFUSE ( Decline )
2.)	SUSpect ( Person to be suspected )
susPECT ( Guess )
3.) 	OBject ( Thing )
obJECT ( Disagree )
4.)	PREsent ( Gift )
preSENT ( Show )
These are the things you know, but don't know you know.


There is a poem in English which is written fully in palindromes.
This was written by WEIRD AL YANKOVIC who is an American singer, songwriter, parodist, record producer, satirist, actor, voice actor, music video director, film producer, and author.
"Bob"
I, man, am regal - a German am I
 Never odd or even
 If I had a hi-fi
 Madam, I'm Adam
 Too hot to hoot
 No lemons, no melon
 Too bad I hid a boot
 Lisa Bonet ate no basil
 Warsaw was raw
 Was it a car or a cat I saw?
 
 Rise to vote, sir
 Do geese see god?
 "Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod
 Rats live on no evil star
 Won't lovers revolt now?
 Race fast, safe car
 Pa's a sap
 Ma is as selfless as I am
 May a moody baby doom a yam?
 
 Ah, Satan sees Natasha
 No devil lived on
 Lonely Tylenol
 Not a banana baton
 No "x" in "Nixon"
 O, stone, be not so
 O Geronimo, no minor ego
 "Naomi," I moan
 "A Toyota's a Toyota"
 A dog, a panic in a pagoda
 
 Oh no! Don Ho!
 Nurse, I spy gypsies - run!
 Senile felines
 Now I see bees I won
 UFO tofu
 We panic in a pew
 Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo
 God! A red nugget! A fat egg under a dog!
 Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog



He punched me in the eye yesterday.

If you add the word only at different places in the sentence the meaning changes completely. 

Only he punched me in the eye yesterday. (No one else did)

He only punched me in the eye yesterday. (Just the eye, nowhere else)

He punched only me in the eye yesterday. (No one else was punched)

He punched me only in the eye yesterday. (Just the eye, nowhere else)

He punched me in only the eye yesterday. (Same as as above)

He punched me in the only eye yesterday. (I have only one eye!)

He punched me in the eye only yesterday. (Not today)




Lead and read rhyme with each other, but lead and read don't rhyme with each other and neither do lead and read. But then lead and read rhyme with each other so it balances out.





There are too many words for ‘being drunk’ than you can think of. Probably, more than 3000! (Including modern day slang.)
Let me give you a gist with each alphabet.
•	addled
•	bashed
•	canned
•	decimated
•	etched
•	flushed
•	gassed
•	hammered
•	intoxicated
•	juiced
•	kippered
•	lashed
•	mangled
•	narcotized
•	obliterated
•	pissed
•	quarrelsome
•	ratted
•	sauced
•	tanked
•	unsteady
•	vulcanized
•	wasted
•	xylophoned
•	yoopered
•	zonked
Phew! I need a drink.
English has 3,000 words for being drunk
365 words for drunk
Ben Franklin's 200+ Synonyms for "Drunk"



This always amazes my students (I teach in the Philippines, where English is a second language).
Which of these groups of words takes the longest to say aloud?
One. Two. Three. Four.
One and two and three and four.
One and a two and a three and a four.
One and then a two and then a three and then a four.
The students will usually say the fourth group takes the longest. One or two will say the first, because you have to pause after each word.
So, all right, I say, let’s say them aloud together, and I’ll time them using my hand as a baton.
And—surprise!—all four groups take the same time to say.
Because English is a stress-timed language. Tagalog (or Filipino) and other Philippine languages, or even Korean, Japanese, Spanish and others are syllable-timed languages. But English is spoken by going from stress to stress.
(And that is why their relatives who grew up in the ‘States, when they try speaking in Tagalog, sound “bulol,” meaning they stumble over their words.)



I was casually reading up on homophones and homonyms the other day, and can I just say that as a non-native English speaker I still have no idea how I managed to learn this language.
Some of the things I thought of after reading are:
1.	Read and lead rhyme and read and lead rhyme, but neither read and lead nor read and lead rhyme with each other.
2.	Read rhymes with need, and read rhymes with bed, but neither read and bed nor read and need rhyme with each other.
3.	Said is pronounced like paid, and said is pronounced like bread, but neither said and paid nor said and bread are pronounced like each other.
4.	The dove dove into the trees, is a perfectly acceptable sentence.
5.	The man decided to desert his dessert in the desert, is equally acceptable.
6.	Route and route could mean different things based on whether they’re used as a noun or a verb.
7.	Also, why is tear and tier and tyre and tire pronounced in the same way, whereas tear and tear are pronounced so differently?
8.	By the bye, I’d like to buy that from you.
9.	Do gorillas practice guerrilla warfare?
10.	I can cite the site by sight.






A SHOT OF WHISKEY – In the old west a .45 cartridge for a six-gun cost 12 cents, so did a glass of whiskey. If a cowhand was low on cash he would often give the bartender a cartridge in exchange for a drink. This became known as a “shot” of whiskey.
THE WHOLE NINE YARDS – American fighter planes in WW2 had machine guns that were fed by a belt of cartridges. The average plane held belts that were 27 feet (9 yards) long. If the pilot used up all his ammo he was said to have given it the whole nine yards.
BUYING THE FARM – This is synonymous with dying. During WW1 soldiers were given life insurance policies worth $5,000. This was about the price of an average farm so if you died you “bought the farm” for your survivors.
IRON CLAD CONTRACT – This came about from the ironclad ships of the Civil War. It meant something so strong it could not be broken.
PASSING THE BUCK/THE BUCK STOPS HERE – Most men in the early west carried a jack knife made by the Buck knife company. When playing poker it as common to place one of these Buck knives in front of the dealer so that everyone knew who he was. When it was time for a new dealer the deck of cards and the knife were given to the new dealer. If this person didn’t want to deal he would “pass the buck” to the next player. If that player accepted then “the buck stopped there”.
RIFF RAFF – The Mississippi River was the main way of traveling from north to south. Riverboats carried passengers and freight but they were expensive so most people used rafts. Everything had the right of way over rafts which were considered cheap. The steering oar on the rafts was called a “riff” and this transposed into riff-raff, meaning low class.
COBWEB – The Old English word for “spider” was “cob”.
SHIP STATE ROOMS – Traveling by steamboat was considered the height of comfort. Passenger cabins on the boats were not numbered. Instead they were named after states. To this day cabins on ships are called staterooms.
SLEEP TIGHT – Early beds were made with a wooden frame. Ropes were tied across the frame in a criss-cross pattern. A straw mattress was then put on top of the ropes. Over time the ropes stretched, causing the bed to sag. The owner would then tighten the ropes to get a better night’s sleep.
SHOWBOAT – These were floating theaters built on a barge that was pushed by a steamboat. These played small towns along the Mississippi River. Unlike the boat shown in the movie “Showboat” these did not have an engine. They were gaudy and attention grabbing which is why we say someone who is being the life of the party is “showboating”.
OVER A BARREL – In the days before CPR a drowning victim would be placed face down over a barrel and the barrel would be rolled back and forth in an effort to empty the lungs of water. It was rarely effective. If you are over a barrel you are in deep trouble.
BARGE IN – Heavy freight was moved along the Mississippi in large barges pushed by steamboats. These were hard to control and would sometimes swing into piers or other boats. People would say they “barged in”.
HOGWASH – Steamboats carried both people and animals. Since pigs smelled so bad they would be washed before being put on board. The mud and other filth that was washed off were considered useless “hog wash”.
CURFEW – The word “curfew” comes from the French phrase “couvre-feu”, which means “cover the fire”. It was used to describe the time of blowing out all lamps and candles. It was later adopted into Middle English as “curfeu”, which later became the modern “curfew”. In the early American colonies homes had no real fireplaces so a fire was built in the center of the room. In order to make sure a fire did not get out of control during the night it was required that, by an agreed upon time, all fires would be covered with a clay pot called-a “curfew”.
BARRELS OF OIL – When the first oil wells were drilled they had made no provision for stori...
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We continue to use Anglo-Saxon words like "cow" and "sheep"  (Kuh and Schaf in modern German) to describe animals in the field or barn, where the farm hands would handle them, but we use the languge of their Norman lords to describe them once they've reached the dinner table as "beef" and "mutton" (boeuf and mouton in modern French, whether on the hoof or on the plate).








•	From about 1975 to 1985, the recordholder for the longest name was Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfe¬schlegelstein¬hausenberger¬dorffvoraltern¬waren-gewissenhaft¬schaferswessen¬schafewaren¬wohlgepflege¬und¬sorgfaltigkeit-beschutzen¬von¬angreifen¬durch¬ihrraubgierigfeinde¬welche¬voraltern¬zwolftausend-jahres¬vorandieerscheinen¬wander¬ersteer¬dem¬enschderraumschiff¬gebrauchlicht-als¬sein¬ursprung¬von¬kraftgestart¬sein¬lange¬fahrt¬hinzwischen¬sternartigraum¬auf¬der-suchenach¬diestern¬welche¬gehabt¬bewohnbar¬planeten¬kreise¬drehen¬sich¬und¬wohin-der¬neurasse¬von¬verstandigmen¬schlichkeit¬konnte¬fortplanzen¬und¬sicher¬freuen-anlebens¬langlich¬freude¬und¬ruhe¬mit¬nicht¬ein¬furcht¬vor¬angreifen¬von¬anderer-intelligent¬geschopfs¬von¬hinzwischen¬sternartigraum, Senior (746 letters), also known as Wolfe+585, Senior.
•	strenghts is the longest word in english containing only one vowel
•	The longest words with no repeated letters are dermatoglyphics, misconjugatedly and uncopyrightables









What is called a “French kiss” in the English speaking world is known as an “English kiss” in France.

There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs five times: “indivisibility.”





“You cannot end a sentence with because because because is a conjunction”.......it is the only sentence with three conjuctions in a row





Hello Grammar nazis and down voters.

Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghhuot slelinpg was ipmorantt!


•	'Oxyphenbutazone' is the highest scoring word in a game of scrabble.
•	'Twyndyllyng' is the longest word in the English language without any vowels.
•	The word 'startling' is the only nine letter word in English where you can remove one letter at a time to create another word.

FLIPFLIP

All the sounds in the English language are pulmonary egressive, ie, where the airstream flows outward. No sound is used where the air is sucked in.
All consontal sounds are made when the air, pushed out of the lungs, is stopped from leaving the nose or mouth using the teeth, tongue or lips. allowing the air to escape.
The most interesting thing is, that ONE letter of the alphabet corresponds to different sounds. So we have 'k' and 's' sounds for the letter C as in cat and city. No wonder 'ough' can be pronounced in ten different ways. Rough (ruff), Lough (lok), Plough(plaaww), through (throo), Slough (slaaww OR sloo), though (thow) hiccough (hikkup), Cough (koff), Thought (thawt) , Thorough (thur oh)
Let's see…
The wind was ROUGH along the LOUGH as the PLOUGHMAN fought THROUGH the SLOUGH and snow, and THOUGH he HICCOUGHED and he COUGHED, he THOUGHT only of his work, so THOROUGH was he




A sir from my primary schooling told us the beauty of this word: STARTLING

Every time you cut one letter from the word, it forms another word in the same order. 

STARTLING
STARTING
STARING
STRING
STING
SING
SIN
IN
I

Amazing is the English language!




 
English, Ladies and Gentlemen!
#2
Out of the 26 languages mentioned below…
 
Yes, English may be weird but, it can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.




Originally Answered: What are some mind-blowing facts about the English language?
A simple fact that in countries like China/Russia/Brazil etc. almost everyone is learning English at school, and only a small percentage of people there can communicate in it.




•	Only She saw my dress.
•	She Only saw my dress.
•	She saw Only my dress.
•	She saw my Only dress.
•	She saw my dress Only.
Did you notice something?? No?? Read it again. With the position of the Only the meaning of sentence changes completely.
Read it carefully!




There are many wonderful answers to this question as I have’t read all 100+ answers so please ignore if this has been mentioned earlier.
Read it out loud, stressing bold word.
I didn't say she stole my money - someone else said it.
I didn't say she stole my money - I didn't say it.
I didn't say she stole my money - I only implied it.
I didn't say she stole my money - I said someone did, not necessarily her.
I didn't say she stole my money - I considered it borrowed, even though she didn't ask.
I didn't say she stole my money - only that she stole money.
I didn't say she stole my money - she stole stuff which cost me money to replace.
The English language, everyone, shifting stress from one word to another can change the meaning of whole sentence.




FOUR - the Cosmic number
Take any number and express it in words(in English of course).
Count the number of letters in the word.
Express the new number again in words.
Continue this process and eventually you’ll always end up with the word ‘FOUR’ where you’ll be stuck.
This happens because FOUR is the only number which has the same number of letters as the value the number represents (again in English).
Ex:
7 (SEVEN)
S - E - V - E - N = 5 letters
F - I - V - E = 4 letters
F - O - U - R = 4 letters
1000(THOUSAND)
T - H - O - U - S - A - N - D = 8 letters
E - I - G - H - T = 5 letters
F - I - V - E = 4 letters
F - O - U - R = 4 letters
22(TWENTY TWO)
T - W - E - N - T - Y - - T - W - O = 10 letters
T - E - N = 3 letters
T - H - R - E - E = 5 letters
F - I - V - E = 4 letters
F - O - U - R = 4 letters
This happens only in the English language as far as I know



Have you ever wondered why the English computer keyboard is set out in the way it is instead of in alphabetical order? The reason for this is on early typewriters, the keys needed to be arranged in a certain way so that the mechanical rods which held the letters did not clash too much and jam. The letters needed to be separated so that the ones which were most commonly used were not next to each other.



Read sounds like lead. Read sounds like lead.
But read doesn't sound like lead, and read doesn't sound like lead.
It's more weird than mind blowing, but I still found it worth mentioning.
Hope you get it.



Question :  Can you construct a sentence in English by using "because" three times in it?
Answer :  No sentence ends in because, because, because is a conjunction
btw this question was asked to Dr. C. N. Annadurai, fondly called Anna by millions of 


Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
This quote, credited to having been brought into existence by American comedian Groucho Marx,would amuse most native as well as non-native English speakers.
Time flies like an arrow means that time moves as swiftly as an arrow and flies in this context is a verb.
Fruit flies like a banana means that bunch of flies called fruit flies prefer banana and flies in this context is a noun.



1) During the middle ages, the aristocratic classes in England spoke Anglo-Norman French and only the lower classes spoke English language

2) Until 1870's, the  schools in England taught only Greek and Latin and there were no professors of English literature in Oxford and Cambridge. But then back in India schools had a well developed curriculum to teach English.

3) James Murray was the person influential in publishing the first Oxford English Dictionary which ran into 12 volumes. James Murray was a Scotsman and his work replaced Samuel Johnson's (Englishman) pre-eminent dictionary.




This is a fun fact:
Which is the most dangerous Alphabet
" W "
b'coz...It is tension generator..
All the
Worries get initiated with 'w '
Who
Why
What
When
Which
Whom
Where
War
Wine
Whisky
Wealth
Work
Worries
Woman
& finally...Believe it or not
** W I F E **
and the most dangerous question coming from w (wife)
"Woh" kaun thi.?
All The Major Things A Woman Needs In Her LifeTime Start With The
Letter 'M'. Ⓜ
Ⓜ Man.
Ⓜ Money.
Ⓜ Make-Up.
Ⓜ Motor Car.
Ⓜ Movies.
Ⓜ Masti.
Ⓜ Mall.
Last But Not The Least.
And The 2 Most Imp.
Ⓜ Maid
&
Ⓜ Maaikewaale.



"ENGLISH" is "NOT SO ENGLISH".

From the multiple meanings of "ENGLISH" , the fact that it is a language is one of them. And the most interesting fact about this language is that it is a west-germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects, brought to Britain by Germanic invaders from the places which are now called North West Germany and the Netherlands.
So, in fact , the language "ENGLISH" is "NOT SO ENGLISH".




'was it a car or a car I saw'
 



is the only English sentence which can be read from both sides either from right or left.




English is such a complex language..!!
The plural of box is boxes but plural of ox is oxen, not oxes !! One fowl is a goose but two are called geese ..yet the plural of moose shall never be meese..!! You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice, Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice !!
If the plural of man is called men,Then why shouln’t the plural of pan be called pen ? If i speak of foot and show you my feet..And if i give you boot, would a pair be called beet ? If one is a tooth and whole set is teeth..why shouldn’t the plural of booth be beeth ?
Then one may be that and three must be those yet hat’s plural will never be hose..And plural of cat is cats , not cose..!!We speak of a brother and also of a brethren though we say mother but never methren !! Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him..but what about she , shis and shim ??
Source : Facebook




Some words can only be defined by use and example. For instance the word Even.
1.	Meaning same level or quantity as in ‘the divided the treasure even Steven's
2.	Even I like ice cream. The sentence implies everyone likes ice-cream and i do too.
3.	I even like ice-cream. The sentence implies most don't like ice cream but I am an exception and like it
4.	Even unto death. Describes how extreme something can go
Some words are best explained by example and their meaning can change completely by their placement in a sentence




I am gujarati and in our gujarati we have a different words for male friend and female female friend.
We call bhai bandh to our male friend and if it is female friend we referred her as our bahenpani in our gujarati.
But in english language there is common word for both which is friend.
I personally feels that ‘A friend is a friend know matter if it is male or female’
And it helps me a lot, now whenever my mother ask me with whom i am, i always answer her that ‘hu friend sathe 6u mumma’ (it means i am with my friend) now i don't have to tell her that I'm with my female friends :p




The usage of the same words in a different manner! Each time they convey a different meaning.
I never said she she stole your money.
1. I never said she stole your money. (Someone else did)
2. I never said she stole your money. (never said that)
3. I never said she stole your money. (implied it some other way)
4. I never said she stole your money. (she didn't, someone else did)
5. I never said she stole your money. (may be she borrowed it)
6. I never said she stole your money. (money was not yours)
7. I never said she stole your money. (she stole something else.)




Magic of punctuations when used smartly:

Girl-So you like someone?
Boy-Yeah, you
Girl-But I have a boyfriend.
Boy-Oops. I think I missed the question mark. It was.. Yeah,you?




English Language is so Funny that it can Make you hell laugh if you misused its grammar & vocabulary!

1. Principal To Student..." I Saw you Yesterday Rotating Near Girls Hostel Pulling Cigarette... ? "

2. Class Teacher Once Said :" Pick Up The Paper And Fall In The Dust bin!!!

3 "Don't try to talk in front of my back.."

4. Don't..Laugh At The Back Benches... Otherwise Teeth And All Will Be Fallen Down.....

5.She Tried To Switch The Fan On, But There Was Some Problem. And Then She Said "
Why Is Fan Not Oning" (Ing Form Of On)

6 Teacher In a Furious Mood... Write Down your Name And Father Of your Name!!

7 "Shhh... Quiet... The Principal Is Revolving Around College"

8. My Manager Started Like This "Hi, I Am Madhu, Married With Two Kids"

9. "Will you hang that Calendar Or Else I'll HANG MYSELF"

10  Chemistry HOD Comes And Tells Us... "My Aim Is To Study My Son And Marry My Daughter"

11. Tomorrow Call your Parents Especially Mother And Father

12 "Why Are You Looking At The Monkeys Outside When I Am In The Class?!"

13  Seeing The Principal Passing By, The Teacher Told The Noisy Class.. "Keep Quiet, The Principal Has Passed away!

14 I Have 3 Daughters, All Are Girl :)
•	
•	
•	
•	
•	The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.
•	The following sentence:
'A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.'
contains the nine different pronunciations of "ough" in the English Language.
•	The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.




•	Apples say that bananas are brainless.
•	Apples, say that bananas are brainless.
•	Apples say that bananas are brainless?
All the above sentences are same, but punctuation signs outfits everything!
Cheers!




Fill in the blank by using active or passive voice(Also cite the reason):

Q: English _________ by the English. (Speak)

We were asked this question by our English teacher in 10th std.

The answer definitely was "English is spoken by the English".

But how? Sometimes I'd get correct solution at the end of a Mathematical Equation but then I would wonder how did I get it right. Alright, Jokes(Maths) apart!
So I scratched my head. After finishing, I also scratched my friend's head but that didn't prove fruitful. We then argued that the sentence itself was an incorrect one and to get the answer from the teacher himself, we pitched on high tone, "We demand an explanation!" 

Explanation: People native to England are known as the English (People).
 So the sentence was correct. English is spoken by the English people. 'People' is implied here. Wait, I am teaching English the wrong way.

Anyway, the sentence was technically correct. English is spoken by the English.




More English words begin with the letter ‘S’ than any other letter of the alphabet.




Here are some examples:

The NOTABLE surgeon is NOT ABLE to do perform the surgery as there is NO TABLE.



Pangrams: Sentences with all the 26 letters in English Language.
Example: The five boxing wizards jump quickly.




Linguistic humor, The English lesson
We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes; 
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes. 
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese, 
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese. 
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice, 
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice. 
If the plural of man is always called men, 
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen? 
The cow in the plural may be cows or kine, 
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine. 
I speak of my foot and show you my feet, 
If I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet? 
If one is a tooth, and a whole set are teeth, 
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth? 
If the singular is this and the plural is these, 
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be named kese? 
Then one may be that, and three may be those, 
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose; 
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren, 
But though we say mother, we never say methren. 
The masculine pronouns are he, his and him, 
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim! 
So our English, I think, you all will agree, 
Is the craziest language you ever did see. 

I take it you already know 
Of tough and bough and cough and dough? 
Others may stumble, but not you, 
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through? 
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps 
To learn of less familiar traps? 
Beware of heard, a dreadful word, 
That looks like beard and sounds like bird. 
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead; 
For goodness sake, don't call it deed! 
Watch out for meat and great and threat; 
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt. 
A moth is not a moth in mother, 
Nor both in bother, broth in brother. 
And here is not a match for there, 
Or dear and fear for bear and pear. 
And then there's dose and rose and lose, 
Just look them up, and goose and choose. 
And cork and work and card and ward, 
And font and front and word and sword. 
And do and go, then thwart and cart. 
Come, come, I've hardly made a start. 
A dreadful language? Why, man alive, 
I'd learned to talk it when I was five, 
And yet to write it, the more I tried, 
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five! 
So the English, I think, you all will agree,
Is the queerest language you ever did see.

Source - Grammarly
Adapted from an unknown author.

Steven Wright type jokes (George Carlin and Gallagher have also used these)
Whose cruel idea was it for the word "lisp" to have an "s" in it?
Since light travels faster than sound, isn't that why some people appear bright until you hear them speak?
How come abbreviated is such a long word?
If it's zero degrees outside today and it's supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold is it going to be? 
Why do you press harder on a remote-control when you know the battery is dead?
Since Americans throw rice at weddings, do Asians throw hamburgers?
Why are they called buildings, when they're already finished? Shouldn't they be called builts?
Why are they called apartments, when they're all stuck together? 
Why do people without a watch look at their wrist when you ask them what time it is? 
Why do you ask someone without a watch what time it is? 
Why does sour cream have an expiration date? 
Who is general failure and why is he reading my disk? 
The light went out, but where to? 
Why do banks charge you a "non-sufficient funds fee" on money they already know you don't have? 
Does the reverse side also have a reverse side? 
Why is the alphabet in that order? 
If the universe is everything, and scientists say that the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? 
If you got into a taxi and the driver started driving backward, would the taxi driver end up owing you money? 
What would a chair look like if your knees bent the other way? 
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to see it, do the other trees make fun of it? 
Why is a carrot more orange than an orange? 
When two airplanes almost collide why do they call it a near miss?? It sounds like a near hit to me!! 
Do fish get cramps after eating? 
Why are there 5 syllables in the word "monosylabic"? 
Why do they call it the Department of Interior when they are in charge of everything outdoors? 
Why do scientists call it research when looking for something new? 
If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat? 
When I erase a word with a pencil, where does it go? 
Why is it, when a door is open it's ajar, but when a jar is open, it's not a door? 
Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it. 
How come Superman could stop bullets with his chest, but always ducked when someone threw a gun at him? 
If "con" is the opposite of "pro," then what is the opposite of progress? 
Why is lemon juice mostly artificial ingredients but dishwashing liquid contains real lemons? 
How much deeper would the ocean be if sponges didn't grow in it? 
Why buy a product that it takes 2000 flushes to get rid of? 
Why do we wait until a pig is dead to "cure" it? 
Why do we wash bath towels? Aren't we clean when we use them? 
Why do we put suits in a garment bag and put garments in a suitcase? 
Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle? 
Do Roman paramedics refer to IV's as "4's"? 
What do little birdies see when they get knocked unconscious? 
Why doesn't Tarzan have a beard? 
If man evolved from monkeys and apes, why do we still have monkeys and apes? 
Should you trust a stockbroker who's married to a travel agent? 
Is boneless chicken considered to be an invertebrate? 
Do married people live longer than single people or does it just SEEM longer?
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?"  She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose. 
If all those psychics know the winning lottery numbers, why are they all still working? 
Isn't Disney World a people trap operated by a mouse? 
Sooner or later, doesn't EVERYONE stop smoking? 
Isn't the best way to save face to keep the lower part shut? 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
Ever wonder about those people who spend $2.00 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backwards: NAIVE 
OK.... so if the Jacksonville Jaguars are known as the "Jags" and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are known as the "Bucs," what does that make the Tennessee Titans? 
If 4 out of 5 people SUFFER from diarrhea...does that mean that one enjoys it? 
If people from Poland are called Poles, why aren't people from Holland called Holes? 
Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery? 
If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled? 
Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist but a person who drives a racecar is not called a racist? 
Why isn't the number 11 pronounced onety one? 
If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed? 
If Fed Ex and UPS were to merge, would they call it Fed UP? 
Do Lipton Tea employees take coffee breaks? 

What's UP? 
There is a two letter word that perhaps has more meaning than any other two letter word it's UP. It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we waken in the morning, why do we wake UP? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report? We call UP our friends, we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, wewarm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car. At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special, and this is confusing. A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP. We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. 
We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP. To be knowledgeable of the proper uses of UP, look UP the word in the dictionary. In a desk size dictionary, UP takes UP almost 1/4th the page and definitions add UP to about thirty. If you are UP to it, you might trybuilding UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more. When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When it doesn't rain for a while, things dry UP. One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so I'll shut UP. 


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. 


When the English tongue we speak, 
Why is "break" not rhymed with "freak"? 
And the maker of a verse 
Cannot cap his "horse" with "worse"? 
"Beard" sounds not the same as "heard." 
"Cord" is different from "word". 
"Cow" is cow, but "low is low. 
"Shoe" is never rhymed with "foe." 
Think of "hose" and "dose" and "lose", 
And of "goose" and yet of "choose." 
Think of "comb" and "tomb" and "bomb", 
"Doll" and"roll" and "home " and "some." 
And since "pay" is rhymed with "say," 
Why not "paid" and "said," I pray? 
We have "blood" and "food" and "good." 
"Mould" is not pronounced like "could." 
Wherefore "done," but "gone" and "one"? 
Is there any reason known? 
And, in short, it seems to me, 
Sounds and letters disagree 
What about "cough" and "through" and "tougher" 
Which don't sound anything like each other. 
"Thorough" can be made to rhyme with "dough,: 
But "bough" sounds like "cow" and not like "though". 
"Draught" is spelled a lot like " taught", 
But only one of them sounds like "bought." 
We haven't mentioned "laughter" or "daughter," 
Neither of which is spelled like it oughter. 
Everyone says that " might" makes "right." 
So how come "eight" doesn't rhyme with "sleight"? 
"Trough" can rhyme with "off" or "moth", 
And on that note, I'll end this froth. 
- quoted in Ann Landers






I lost my appetite! 
If GH stands for P as in "hiccough", 
if OUGH stands for O as in "dough", 
if PHTH stands for T as in "phthisis 
if EIGH stands for A as in "neighbor", 
if TTE stands for T as in "gazette", and 
if EAU stands for O as in "plateau", then 
the right way to spell POTATO should be: GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU! 




Let's take this sentence
“Give me a cup of coffee “ Now stress on the highlighted letters while reading.
1.	Give me! a cup of coffee.- You are ordering some one for coffee.
2.	Give me a cup of coffee - You are asking coffee only for yourself.
3.	Give me a cup of coffee - You are asking only a cup of coffee.
4.	Give me a cup of coffee - You are asking for coffee particularly.




There are some 2 billion people on the planet who can understand English on a good enough level to hold a conversation in that language. It makes English by far the most spoken L2 language in the world.







Do we know actual full form of some words???  

News paper =  North East West South past and present events report.

Chess =  Chariot, Horse, Elephant, Soldiers.

Cold = Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease.

Joke = Joy of Kids Entertainment.

Aim = Ambition in Mind.

Date = Day and Time Evolution.

Eat = Energy and Taste.

Tea = Taste and Energy Admitted.

Pen = Power Enriched in Nib.

Smile = Sweet Memories in Lips Expression.

Bye = Be with you Everytime.




There are no nouns, verbs or adjectives that begin with a voiced TH sound (as in the) and only three words that end with it, with, forthwith and smooth.
In the Liverpudlian accent, ‘Where were you?’ is pronounced ‘Were where yeh?’
The letter pair EA has 14 different pronunciations; flea, bread, area, search, steak, swear, react, ocean, create, heart, beauty, rearm, bureau, and séance.
The German for many irregular English plurals have umlauts only in their plurals; 
feet Füße, geese Gänse, teeth Zähne, mice Mäuse, men Männer.




Don't know if they are mentioned already in any of the answers but here they are:
•	More English words begin with the letter ‘S’ than any other letter of the alphabet.
•	The longest English word that can be spelled without repeating any letters is ‘uncopyrightable’.
•	The longest word in English has 45 letters: ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’! It is a type of lung disease caused by inhaling ash and sand dust.
•	‘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!
•	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!
•	The most difficult tongue twister in the English language is “sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick”.
•	Approximately one new word is added to the English language every two hours and around 4,000 new words are added to the English dictionary every year.


Here are some interesting facts about English Language for You:

- The chess term “checkmate” comes from a 14th century Arabic phrase, “shah mat”, which means “the king is helpless”.
- 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”.
- The past tense of “dare” is “durst”.





'Dreamt' is the only word in the English language that ends in 'mt'.
PS- Now stop thinking, and start scrolling! :)





•	The word "queue" is pronounced the same way when the last 4 letters are removed.
•	“Time" is the most commonly used noun in English.
•	The shortest complete sentence in the English language is "Go".
•	The day after tomorrow is called"Overmorrow".
•	It is not the official language of England.




"Strengths" has the most consonants of a one syllable word - 9 letters, only one of which is a vowel.




Consider the statement:
1.I never said she stole my money .
2.I never said she stole my money.
3.I never said she stole my money.
4.I never said she stole my money.
5.I never said she stole my money.
6.I never said she stole my money.
7.I never said she stole my money.
Observe something? These statements all have different meanings.This kind of feature is one of the things that should not be adopted by programming languages .




Here is this interesting sentence in this funny language-

I can can a can ....!!!

Where each CAN has different meaning -

1.can = to able (v)

2.can = to fill or pack airtight  can or box (v)

3.can = box or can we usually use (n)






Put ‘only’ anywhere in the sentence below-
She told him she loved him.



Idioms

Bite the bullet
Wounded soldiers in WW1 being operated on without anaesthetic literally had to bite a bullet to deal with the pain.

Fly by the seats of your pants
Used in a 1938 headline to describe Douglas Corrigan’s 29 hour flight from Brooklyn to Dublin, which was meant to be to California. Corrigan had filed for a transatlantic flight two days earlier but it was rejected because his plane was not considered fit for the job. Upon landing in Dublin he claimed his compass had packed up.

Go doolally
After the Indian garrison town of Deolali where British soldiers waited, sometimes for months, to be taken back to Britain after their tour of duty. There was nothing to do and many may have been suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

It’s brass monkeys outside
A ship’s cannon balls used to be stacked on a brass structure called a ‘monkey’; the brass would contract in arctic temperatures and the cannon balls would fall off.

Three sheets to the wind
‘Sheets’ refers to the ropes with which a sail is fastened, two per sail. If out of four sheets, one was not properly fastened, the ship would become difficult to control and would be ‘to the wind’, moving as erratically as a drunk.

Separate the wheat from the chaff
The phrase comes from Matthew 3:12 where John the Baptist describes the man to come after him: ‘His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’ In the Old Testament the image of winnowing is also used in Psalm 1:4: ‘…the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away. 

Skin of your teeth
Job describes his state (Job 19: 20): ‘My bone clings to my skin and to my flesh, / And I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.’ The phrases suggests something so thin and elusive as to be insubstantial.

Through the eye of a needle
From Matthew 19:24; Mark 10:25; and Luke 18:25. Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than for a rich person to get to heaven.

Happy as a sand boy
In Bristol there were pubs where fine sand from sea caves was strewn on the ground to soak up spills. The lads who collected the sand were partially paid in drink and were consequently usually quite merry or happy.

Sweet Fanny Adams
This can be seen as a euphemism with Fanny Adams standing for F. A.
Fanny Adams (8) was the victim in a 1867 murder case, cut into pieces and thrown into the River Wey. A broadside ballad about the murder referred to her as ‘sweet’; a term British Naval slang later adopted to refer to tinned stew, apparently not very popular with the sailors.

Up the duff/in the club
‘In the club’ refers to The Pudding Club. Both, duff and pudding are euphemistic expressions for penis and crudely link intercourse and pregnancy.

Butter up
A figurative saying to illustrate that someone is smothered in pleasantries.

Kick the bucket
Popular understanding is that in a lynching someone would kick the bucket away from under the person about to be hanged. However, a 1570 English dictionary records the word ‘bucket’ as a synonym for ‘beam’ - animals for slaughter would be hung upside down from such a beam and would kick the bucket (or beam) in their struggle during slaughter.

Storm in a teacup/tempest in a teapot
The ‘tempest’ in a teacup or teapot is an image used in Roman philosopher Cicero’s De Legibus in approximately 100 BC. ‘Billows in a spoon’.

Bob’s your Uncle
In 1886 PM Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (Lord Salisbury) surprisingly made Arthur Balfour Chief Secretary of Ireland; Balfour was ‘Bob’s’ nephew.

Eat Humble Pie
Umbles, from Middle English, comes from Old French nombles meaning loin. It refers to offal, a meal for the poor.

Mad as a hatter
In the 18th and 19th century mercury was used in felting – and hat making; the madness of hat makers was the result of mercury poisoning.

Piss Poor
In ancient times, urine was used in tanneries to soak the animal hides. A way for very poor families to make a few pennies was to sell their urine.

Kangaroo Court
19th century American courts, especially in the Gold Rush, would skip procedures to assure quick sentencing. Australian prospectors, of which there were a considerable number, likened this to kangaroos hopping or skipping.

Skeleton in the cupboard
Until the 1830s it was illegal to dissect human bodies, so grave-robbers and murderers supplied medical schools and doctors with bodies. These had to be hidden in case of raids. William Thackeray, satirical writer of Vanity Fair, used this phrase for the first time in print in 1845.

Carry your heart on your sleeve
In Othello Act 1 Scene 1, 64 Iago says “But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve…” meaning he would be exposed.

It was a dickens of a job
Shakespeare used this weakened form ‘Dickens’ for ‘devil’ or ‘devilkin’ in The Merry Wives of Windsor ‘I cannot tell what the Dickens his name is’ Act 3 Scene 2.

Have a butchers
Much Cockney Rhyming slang leaves out the word that actually rhymes to confuse the uninitiated. This goes back to ‘butcher’s hook’, which rhymes with ‘look’.

Haven’t seen you in donkey’s years
The longevity of donkeys and the length of their ears.

Taking the Mickey
As so often in rhyming slang, the actual rhyming word, Mickey ‘Bliss’ is left out. Some sources claim he was a 1950s BBC radio personality, but Mr Bliss remains elusive.

It’s raining cats and dogs
An instance of rhyming slang after frogs were whipped into the air during a storm and came back down again with the rain (as testified to in historical accounts).

Horses for courses
Horses perform better on certain courses. A horse that does well on a damp course may not do so well on a dry course.

Red herring
To train young hunting dogs to follow a scent, the carcass of a cat or fox or, at a pinch, a smoked and salted herring (of a reddish colour) would be dragged along the ground. There is also the suggestion that it would have been used to see if the dogs would be put off the scent they were meant to follow.

Win hands down
In horse racing, a jockey winning comfortably does not need to use a whip and can ride to the finishing lines with his ‘hands down’.

Point Blank
From the French ‘point blanc’, referring to the white circle at the centre of the target for archery or shooting practice. The meaning of being right on target was therefore the original meaning before it came to signify close up, from where it is easier to hit the ‘point blanc’.
 

It also inspired the following ode by Edison B. Schroeder in 1966:

Time Flies Like an Arrow
An Ode to Oettinger

Now, thin fruit flies like thunderstorms
And thin farm boys like farm girls narrow;
And tax firm men like fat tax forms -
But time flies like an arrow.

When tax forms tax all firm men’s souls,
While farm girls slim their boyfriends’ flanks;
That’s when the murd’rous thunder rolls -
And thins the fruit flies ranks.

Like tossed bananas in the skies,
The thin fruit flies like common yarrow;
Then's the time to time the time flies -
Like the time flies like an arrow.

 



 


Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms

Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim

Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge

Infant Pulled from Wrecked Car Involved in Short Police Pursuit

British left waffles on Falklands

Landmine claims dog arms company







You have just begun reading the sentence you have just finished reading.
Mind. Blown. Now that you’re watching the thoughts you are having about reading this, consider yourself #woke. English grammar is the new third eye opener.


Are you up for chopping a tree down, or are you down to chop it up?
Have you ever tried explaining to a non-native English speaker the difference between being ‘down’ for something and ‘up’ for something? It seems like they should be opposites, but they mean almost the same thing.


A dangling preposition is something up with which I will not put.











The English language can be downright bizarre. The plural of ox is oxen while the plural of box is boxes, ‘rough’ rhymes with ‘gruff’ even though the two words only have two letters in common, and there are actually more than nine hundred exceptions to the infamous “i before e except after c” rule.

If you’re still not convinced that the English language is full of oddities and conundrums, take a look at these five wacky sentences that are actually grammatically correct.


All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life.
Well, talk about lexical ambiguity. But as strange as this sentence might sound, it is actually grammatically correct. The sentence relies on a double use of the past perfect. The two instances of “had had” play different grammatical roles in the sentences—the first is a modifier while the second is the main verb of the sentence.



One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.
This famous Groucho Marx joke takes advantage of the fact that the same sentence can often be interpreted in more than one way. The first sentence can be read in two distinct ways: A) The man shot an elephant while he was wearing his pajamas or B) The man shot an elephant that was wearing his pajamas. It’s unclear who is wearing the pajamas—the man or the elephant. Most people interpret the sentence the first way and are subsequently startled to read the second part of the joke.



The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.
This is what we call a garden path sentence. Though grammatically correct, the reader’s initial interpretation of the sentence may be nonsensical. In other words, the sentence has taken the reader down a dead-end.

Here, “complex” may be interpreted as an adjective and “houses” may be interpreted as a noun. Readers are immediately confused upon reading that the complex houses “married,” interpreting “married” as the verb. How can houses get married? In actuality, “complex” is the noun, “houses” is the verb, and “married” is the adjective. The sentence is trying to express the following: Single soldiers, as well as married soldiers and their families, reside in the complex.



The man the professor the student has studies Rome.
This awkward but grammatically correct sentence is a product of what is known as center embedding. In English, we can typically put one clause inside of another without any problem. We can take “the man studies Rome” and add a bunch of additional information between the noun and the verb. However, the more information that is added, the harder it is to interpret the sentence.

In this particular case, the sentence conveys the following: The student has the professor who knows the man who studies ancient Rome. Each noun corresponds to a verb (the man studies, the student has). But because of the sentence’s syntax, this is hard to decipher. Remember: just because a sentence is grammatically correct doesn’t mean it is acceptable stylistically.









15 Sentences That Prove English is the Craziest Language Ever
by BRAINJET TEAM


Read rhymes with lead, and read rhymes with lead, but read and lead don’t rhyme, and neither do read and lead.
This sentence is completely true since both pronunciations of "read" and "lead" rhyme with each other. It's confusing to read, but makes sense when spoken aloud.


I never said she stole my money.
This sentence may not seem bizarre at first, but it will blow your mind once you start saying it differently. The statement takes on seven comletely different meanings depending on which word is emphasized. Go on and try it — we promise amusement!


The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.
This sentence plays with our common parts of speech assumptions. At first, you probably assumed "complex" was an adjective, "houses" a noun, and "married" a verb. Actually, the sentence only makes sense if "complex" is a noun, "houses" a verb, and "married" an adjective.


All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life.
Good luck getting this sentence past Microsoft Word's grammar check, even though it is grammatically correct. This sentence uses the past perfect tense back-to-back, with the first and third "hads" being auxiliary verbs.


Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Yes, this is a grammatically correct sentence. Since the word "buffalo" is an animal, a city, and a verb in English, this statement is about a bullying war between bison from New York and the buffalo that they pick on.


A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.
With nine possible pronunciations, the "ough" letter combination is probably one of the most versatile in the English language. The sentence illustrates that by making use of every one of them!


A woman without her man is nothing.
Punctuation is so important, and this sentence really proves that. In a study, men and women were given this sentence and asked to correctly puncuate it. Most men made it "A woman, without her man, is nothing." However, most women turned it into "A woman: without her, man is nothing."


The old man the boats.
Doesn't it seem like this sentence is missing a verb? Well, it isn't. Since "man" is actually a verb as well, this statement is about a collective group of old people working on some boats.


You have just begun reading the sentence you have just finished reading.
Whoa, dude! This trippy sentence is completely self-aware and both grammatically and chronologically correct. If you're anything like us, you'll probably read it 10 more times in confusion.


Will Will Smith smith?
We aren't stuttering the Fresh Prince's name — we are actually asking if he's going to forge anything. If Smith happens to be in a smithing mood, you can say "Will Smith will smith." Although Will isn't a metal worker, he actually is a black Smith.


Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.
This sentence plays on the dual meanings of "flies" and "like." Or perhaps there's a breed of insects known as time flies that love arrows, or maybe we never noticed that fruit have the ability to zoom through the air like bananas do?


The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.
This sentence plays with our common parts of speech assumptions. At first, you probably assumed "complex" was an adjective, "houses" a noun, and "married" a verb. Actually, the sentence only makes sense if "complex" is a noun, "houses" a verb, and "married" an adjective.


All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life.
Good luck getting this sentence past Microsoft Word's grammar check, even though it is grammatically correct. This sentence uses the past perfect tense back-to-back, with the first and third "hads" being auxiliary verbs.


I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.

The amazing thing about this grammatically correct sentence is that each word is one letter longer than the one that preceded it.


Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
This isn't just something you'd say after a really bad break-up — it's also a linguistic triumph. This sentence is the shortest possible pangram, meaning it contains every letter of the alphabet using the least amount of letters.


When I tell you pick up the left rock, it will be the right one, and then only the right rock will be left.
"Right" and "left" aren't just confusing concepts for kindergarteners. This sentence illustrates the dual uses for the two words in English. I also hate it when I ask someone I'm driving if I should make a left turn and they respond with "right."


The horse raced past the barn fell.
The reductive relative clause might save you some time, but it also creates confusing sentences like this one. Try including the technically implied "that" after "horse" and you'll see that the sentence is about a fallen steed







I never said she stole my money.
This fun sentence takes on seven different meanings depending on which word is emphasized: [I] never said she stole my money. - Someone else said it. I [never] said she stole my money. - I didn't say it. I never [said] she stole my money. - I only implied it. I never said [she] stole my money. - I said someone did, not necessarily her. I never said she [stole] my money. - I considered it borrowed. I never said she stole [my] money. - Only that she stole money--- not necessarily my own. I never said she stole my [money]. - She stole something of mine, not my money. While this trick works for plenty of other sentences as well, this one’s short and easy to understand. 

All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life.
While it may look like someone copied “had” and pressed the paste button a few too many times, this is actually an example of what happens when the past perfect tense gets used back-to-back. The first and third “hads” are the auxiliary verbs, while the second and fourth ones are the main verbs. Stylistically speaking, the sentence would probably be less confusing if written, “He had had a lot of faith, but it had had no effect on the outcome of his life,” but what fun is that? 

The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.
The fun thing about this sentence is that “complex,” “houses,” and “married” can all serve as different parts of speech. We automatically tend to assume that “houses” is a noun, “complex” is an adjective, and “married” is a verb, but when you realize that “complex” is a housing complex and that soldiers who are married are staying there, things make a lot more sense. 

The horse raced past the barn fell.
You don’t really appreciate little words like “who,” “which,” or “that” until you come across a sentence like this one. The headache you’re experiencing trying to figure this out is due to the presence of a reductive relative clause, which can be seen in sentences like, “The song heard on the radio was beautiful,” instead of, “The song that was heard on the radio was beautiful.” All we have to do to make this a little more simple is change the first part of the sentence: “The horse that was raced past the barn fell.” 

A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed
The letter combination “-ough” has nine possible pronunciations in English (depending on regional dialect), and this delightful sentence contains them all: “uff,” “oh,” “auh,” “ow,” “uh,” “oo,” “off,” and “uhp.” How’s that for a tongue-twister? 

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
It’s not just required luggage for surviving the weekend at the in-laws’ house--- this sentence contains every single letter of the alphabet, while using the smallest number of letters to do so. Go ahead and check; they’re all there. 

This exceeding trifling witling, considering ranting criticizing concerning adopting fitting wording being exhibiting transcending learning, was displaying, notwithstanding ridiculing, surpassing boasting swelling reasoning, respecting correcting erring writing, and touching detecting deceiving arguing during debating.
Ending a word with “ing” can make it a noun, verb, or adjective, depending on how you use it. This sentence, found in a 19th century grammar book, explores just how far we can take the versatile “ing” if we put our minds to it. If you take the time to really dissect this sentence, it’s not as crazy as it initially appears: "This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate." Well, I guess it’s just slightly less confusing. 

A woman without her man is nothing.
This has made the rounds on the internet for a while now, but it’s still a fascinating look at how punctuation can completely change the meaning of a sentence. As the story goes, a professor told his class to correctly punctuate the sentence. The males in the classroom wrote, “A woman, without her man, is nothing.” The women in the class wrote, “A woman: without her, man is nothing.” With just a simple change in punctuation, the entire meaning of the sentence was changed in an instant. 

“I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.”
Author and recreational linguist Dmitri Borgmann came up with this sentence, in which each word is exactly one letter longer than the one before it. The sentence contains twenty words, and although it’s a little confusing to read, if you take the time to analyze it, you’ll notice that it actually makes complete sense. 

“I see,” said the blind man as he picked up the hammer and saw.
This sentence plays off the fact that ‘saw’ is both a noun and the past tense of the verb ‘to see.’ It could mean that the hammer allowed the blind man to regain his eyesight, or that he uttered the phrase while picking up two tools. 

Read rhymes with lead, and read rhymes with lead, but read and lead don’t rhyme, and neither do read and lead.
Isn’t it confusing when one word has two different pronunciations? For this (completely true) sentence to make sense, try reading it like this: “Reed rhymes with leed, and red rhymes with led, but reed and led don’t rhyme, and neither do red and leed.” 

The old man the boats.
It sounds like something a very drunk sailor might say, but this sentence actually isn’t missing a verb. In this case, the word ‘man’ is a verb meaning to take one’s place for service, and ‘old’ is used to mean a collective group of old people 

You have just begun reading the sentence you have just finished reading.
This collection of words is a simple one, but its sole purpose is to take you on a chronological journey of words while making you uncomfortably self-aware. I feel like this belongs somewhere in The Matrix. 

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.
Is there a new breed of insect called a Time Fly that enjoys arrows? Or does fruit have the ability to soar as bananas do? 

One morning, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.
Groucho Marx came up with this witty joke, and while it might be cheating since it requires two sentences for the humor to come through, the first sentence is the one we need to pay attention to. The modifier ‘in my pajamas’ is thought to mean that the subject was in his pjs when he shot an elephant, but when Groucho clarifies himself, we learn that the truth is actually even more bizarre. This is a great example of how a sentence can completely change its meaning based on how we group the words together in our mind. 

When I tell you pick up the left rock, it will be the right one, and then only the right rock will be left.
If you imagine a scenario in which you have a rock to either side of you, this sentence makes perfect sense. The first instance of ‘left’ and the second instance of ‘right’ indicate the location of the rocks. The first instance of ‘right’ means ‘correct,’ and the second instance of ‘left’ is talking about the rock that remains. 

Will Will Smith smith? / Will Smith will smith.
As it turns out, the famous actor and rapper’s name is made up of two verbs. The first possible combination asks if the Fresh Prince is going to take up forging armor as a hobby, while the second one affirms it. 

I chopped a tree down, and then I chopped it up.
Ah, the magic of phrasal verbs. To a non-native English speaker, “to chop down” and “to chop up” seem like they would be direct opposites (and might inspire some interesting mental images). Those who really know the language are aware that chopping something down means to hack at it until it falls, while chopping it up means to cut it into smaller pieces. 

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Noam Chomsky came up with this grammatically correct, but nonsensical sentence in order to prove that syntax and semantics are two very distinct things. You’d probably never hear these words spoken in this order in actual conversation, but all of the words are used correctly. This fascinating video uses this technique to show us how English sounds to people who don’t speak the language--- it sounds like it makes sense because the structure is the same as what we’re used to, but because the words would never be found in that order, we don’t understand what’s being said. 







Let's not look at grammar as a cold, harsh mistress. She can also be a fun, kooky aunt. Here are some tricks you can do to make crazy sounding sentences that are still grammatical. 

1. One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.
Take advantage of the fact that the same sentence can have two different structures. This famous joke from Groucho Marx assumes that most people expect the structure of the first part to be

One morning [I shot an elephant] [in my pajamas].

But another possible, and perfectly grammatical, reading is

One morning [I shot] [an elephant in my pajamas].



2. The horse raced past the barn fell.
Make a garden path sentence. In this one, we think we've reached the main verb when we get to "raced," but instead we are still inside a reduced relative clause. Reduced relative clauses let us say, "the speech given this morning" instead of "the speech that was given this morning" or, in this case "the horse raced past the barn" instead of "the horse that was raced past the barn."



3. The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.
Another garden path sentence, this one depends on the fact that "complex," "houses," and "married" can serve as different parts of speech. Here, "complex" is a noun (a housing complex) instead of an adjective, "houses" is a verb instead of a noun, and "married" is an adjective instead of the past tense of a verb.



4. The rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt.
Make a sentence with multiple center embeddings. We usually have no problem putting one clause inside another in English. We can take "the rat ate the malt" and stick in more information to make "the rat the cat killed ate the malt."  But the more clauses we add in, the harder it gets to understand the sentence. In this case, the rat ate the malt. After that it was killed by a cat. That cat had been chased by a dog. The grammar of the sentence is fine. The style, not so good.



5. Anyone who feels that if so many more students whom we haven’t actually admitted are sitting in on the course than ones we have that the room had to be changed, then probably auditors will have to be excluded, is likely to agree that the curriculum needs revision.
Another crazy center-embedded sentence. Can you figure it out? Start with "anyone who feels X is likely to agree." Then go to "anyone who feels if X then Y is likely to agree." Then fill out the X and Y. You might need a pencil and paper.



6. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Buffalo! It's a noun! It's a city! It's a verb (meaning "to intimidate")! We've discussed the notorious buffalo sentence before, but it never stops being fun. It plays on reduced relative clauses, different part-of-speech readings of the same word, and center embedding, all in the same sentence. Stare at it until you get the following meaning: "Bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in their community, also happen to intimidate other bison in their community."


7. This exceeding trifling witling, considering ranting criticizing concerning adopting fitting wording being exhibiting transcending learning, was displaying, notwithstanding ridiculing, surpassing boasting swelling reasoning, respecting correcting erring writing, and touching detecting deceiving arguing during debating.
This sentence takes advantage of the versatile English –ing. The author of a 19th century grammar guide lamented the fact that one could "run to great excess" in the use of –ing participles "without violating any rule of our common grammars," and constructed this sentence to prove it. It doesn't seem so complicated once you realize it means,

"This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate."

Not only is this a great example of the wonderful crazy things you can do within the bounds of proper English, it's the perfect response to pull out the next time someone tries to criticize your grammar.