Interesting Facts about English

1.  English is a West Germanic language. It's vocabulary is largely Romance because of the Norman Invasion of England in the year 1066. English actually originates from what is now called north west Germany and the Netherlands.
2. Over 80% of the information stored on computers worldwide is in English.
3. 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’!
4. The most common letter in English is "e".11% of the entire English language is just the letter E.
5. The most common vowel in English is "e", followed by "a".
6. The most common consonant in English is "r", followed by "t".
7. The original name for butterfly was flutterby.
8. “Antidisestablishmentarianism” is the longest natural English word which has no scientific origin.
9. The word “tragedy” is originated from the Greek word “tragoedia” which means “goat song”.Here tragos means “goat” and oide means “song”.
10. Every syllable in English must have a vowel (sound). Not all syllables have consonants.
11. 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.
12. 1/4 of the world’s population speaks at least some English.
13. The most common adjective used in English is ‘good’.
14. The most commonly used noun is ‘time’.
15. The last alphabet added in the English Language is not Z. You would think Z would be the last letter to be added to the alphabets in English. But in fact, the last alphabet added in the English Language was the letter J. J was not even a letter before and at those times Julius Caesar was called Iulius.
16. The word ‘set’ has the highest number of definitions and holds the Guinness Book of World Records . This small word has over 430 definitions and requires a 60,000 word definition that covers 24 pages in the 2nd Edition of Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989.
17. According to MIT, “Pad kid poured curd pulled cod” is the toughest tongue twister in the English Language.
18. Month, orange, silver, and purple do not rhyme with any other word.
19. 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.
20. Only two English words in current use end in "-gry". They are "angry" and "hungry".
21. 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.
22. The word "triskaidekaphobia" means "extreme fear of the number 13". This superstition is related to "paraskevidekatriaphobia", which means "fear of Friday the 13th".
23. English is the official language of 67 countries.
24. 90% of English text consists of just 1000 words.
25. English is not the official language of the United States of America, but it is the de facto national language of USA. There are 24 different dialects of English in the US.
26. English is the Associate Official language of the Indian Union.
27. Interestingly India is the second largest English speaking country in the world after the United States of America with over 125 million English Speakers.China has more English speakers than the United States.
28. Shakespeare invented many words, During his lifetime, Shakespeare added around 1,700 words in the English language including words like addiction, assassination, fashionable, manager, uncomfortable,birthplace, blushing, undress, torture and many more !
29. The word ‘lol’ was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011. Today “LOL” is an acronym used for “laugh out loud”. But in the 1960s, LOL is used to describe a “little old lady” in the USA.
30. What is known as British accent came to use in and around London around the time of the American Revolution !
31. More English words begin with the letter "s" than with any other letter.
32. A preposition is always followed by a noun (ie noun, proper noun, pronoun, noun group, gerund).
33. The word "uncopyrightable" is the longest English word in normal use that contains no letter more than once.
34. 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.
35. 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" :)
36. 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.
37. The word "alphabet" comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, bēta.
38. The word ‘Goodbye’ originally comes from an Old English phrase meaning ‘god be with you’.
39. “Eponym” are words in the English Language based on or derived from a person’s name.
40. “Boycott” is an Eponym based on an English estate manager Charles Cunningham Boycott. He imposes unfair rent practices on his tenants due to which his tenants stop harvesting crops on his land.
41. Etymologically, Great Britain means ‘great land of the tattooed’.
42.  The alphabets ‘i’ and ‘j’ are incomplete without the "superscript dot".  on top, and while we’ve always referred to it as the little dot, grammarians have coined a name for it – the Tittle. The Tittle was originally a larger mark, first appearing in Latin manuscripts, but was shortened when Roman-style typefaces were introduced.
43. In normal usage, the # symbol has several names, for example: hash, pound sign, number sign.
44. In English, the @ symbol is usually called "the at sign" or "the at symbol".
45. 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."
46. 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").
47. The shortest complete sentence in English is the following. "I am."
48. The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat" meaning "the king is helpless".
49. 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."
50. The longest English word without a true vowel (a, e, i, o or u) is "rhythm".
51. 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.
52. There are only 4 English words in common use ending in "-dous": hazardous, horrendous, stupendous, and tremendous.
53. 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.
54. The "QWERTY keyboard" gains its name from the fact that its first 6 letter keys are Q, W, E, R, T and Y.  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.
55. 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.)
56. 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.
57. 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.
58. 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. The longest word in English has 45 letters: ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’! It is a type of lung disease caused by inhaling ash and sand dust. Go ahead and try pronouncing that!
59. 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.” E.g. dord, syllabus, morse, phantomnation, etc.
60. 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. The two most common words in English are I and you.
61. 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.   About 4,000 words are added to the dictionary each year !
62. Words that are used to fill in time when speaking, such as ‘like’ or ‘basically’, are called crutch words (they should best be avoided!). we repeat often even though they add no meaning or value to a sentence. . 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.
63. English is the language of the air. English is the official language for maritime and aeronautical communications.This means that all pilots have to identify themselves and speak in English while flying, regardless of their origin.
64. 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.
65. The English language contains a lot of contronyms – words that can have contradictory meanings depending on context. You can read a list here!
66. 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’.
67. 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’
68. The first English dictionary was written in 1755 by Samuel Johnson.
69. “Noah Webster”, also known as the “Father of American Scholarship and Education” learned 26 languages including Old English and Sanskrit to write “An American Dictionary of the English Language” which later came to be known as Merriam-Webster dictionary.
70. In 1879, the Philological Society of London along with Oxford University Press started to work towards making a comprehensive English language dictionary. They completed their task in 1928 and created Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which is one of the most respected and widely used dictionaries in the world. Thus it took almost 50 years to make Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
71. The shortest and oldest word in the English language is "I’’.
72. The word "oysterhood" means "reclusiveness" or "an overwhelming desire to stay at home."
73. An ambigram is a word that looks the same from various orientations. For example, the word "SWIMS" will be the same even when turned upside down.
74. English is the third most spoken native language in the world. Standard Chinese and Spanish are first and second, respectively.
75. If you wrote out all the numbers (e.g. one, two, three . . . ), you would not use the letter "b" until the word "billion." The first number spelled out that contains an "a" is one thousand.
76. Almost all of the 100 most frequently used words in English come from Old English. These words include, "a," "the," "and," pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions (from, with, when), and the various forms of the verbs "to have" and "to be."
77. The Oxford English Corpus contains over 2.5 billion words. The Oxford English Corpus is a collection of 21st-century texts and is used to track the way English changes over time.
78. Most average adult English speakers know between 20,000–35,000 words.
79. Words have a lifespan of anywhere between 1,000 and 20,000 years. More commonly used words tend to last longer.
80. Those who read fiction have a larger vocabulary than those who do not. Fiction usually contains a wider range of vocabulary than nonfiction does.
81. A new word is created every 98 minutes, which is about 14.7 words a day.
82. In 2018, approximately 1.53 billion people speak English as a primary, auxiliary, or business language. This is about 1 in 7 people on Earth.
83. Only one word in all of English has the letters X, Y, and Z in order: Hydroxyzine. This unique word is a type of medicine that prevents sneezing and anxiety.
84. Though not commonly used, the day after tomorrow is called "overmorrow." It was never used. The word Overmorrow has been listed in 1913 Webster but not in 1828 Webster. Many other dictionaries do not even list this word at all.
85. The 1066 Norman Conquest drastically changed the English language. When the Normans (French) conquered England, they brought with them thousands of French words associated with the church, court systems, and government, such as baron, noble, parliament, governor, banquet.
86. English is not the official language of the United States.
87. An anagram is a rearrangement of the letters in a word or phrases to form a different word or phrase. For example, the word "stifle" is an anagram of "itself."
88. The word "queue" sounds the same even if the last four letters are removed. Before it meant "line," a queue meant the tail of a beast in medieval pictures and designs.
89. The longest common word with all the letters in alphabetical order is "almost."
90. “Spoonfeed” is the longest English with all its letters in reverse alphabetical order.
91. “Eunoia” is the shortest English word which contains all the five vowels.
92. “Subbookkeeper” is the only word found in the English language which has four pairs of double letters in a row.
93. Just like Mr. is used to address a man, Ms. is used to address a woman, “Mx.” is used to address genderqueer or non-binary people.
94. More English words begin with the letter "s" than any other letter.
95. It has been estimated that the vocabulary of English includes roughly 1 million words, but this is a very rough estimate
96. According to University of Warwick researchers, the top 10 funniest words in the English language are booty, tit, booby, hooter, nitwit, twit, waddle, tinkle, bebop, and egghead.
97. The word "good" has the most synonyms of any other word in the English language, at 380.
98. The longest word you can make using only four letters is "senseless."
99. Capitonyms are words which change their meaning if the first letter is capitalized. For example: Turkey (the country) and turkey (the bird).
100. The word "the" is the most commonly used English word overall, followed by "be," "to," "of," "and," "a," "in," "that," "have," and "I."