English, born from so many other tongues, and being so rich in texture and depth, is an extraordinary language. There are over 600,000 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, and thanks to corruptions, misinterpretations, altercations and evolution, the language throws up many interesting quirks.
English just has so many words!There are many words that mean almost the same thing,words that are archaic, and words that don’t always seem to fit in due to the language constantly evolving. Here are a few fascinating facts about the English language we’ve put together for you. We hope you enjoy them!
Only two words in the English language end in ‘–gry’ these are angry and hungry. We can’t help but think these two things are somehow connected.
The word bookkeeper is the only unhyphenated English word with three consecutive double letters.
The letter E is the most used letter in the English language and accounts for a massive 11% of the written word.
The shortest –ology in the dictionary is oology, the scientific study of eggs.
The word uncopyrightable is the longest word in the dictionary where no letter is repeated twice.
When you cup your hands together to create a bowl it’s known as a gowpen.
The longest non-medical word in the English dictionary is floccinaucinihilipilification. It means the habit of estimating something as worthless.
The words facetious and abstemious are the only two words in English that contain all of the vowels in the correct order.
A sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet is called a pangram. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is the most famous example of a pangram.
The only word in the dictionary that ends with -mt is dreamt, the variant of dreamed.
Used as a verb, owl means ‘to act wisely despite knowing nothing’.
The dot over the ‘i’ and ‘j’ in English is called a tittle.
The word checkmate comes from a Persian phrase ‘Shah Mat’, which translates as ‘The King is helpless’.
The combination of letters -ough can be pronounced in 9 different ways (hold onto your hats USA)! The following sentence contains them all: “The rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a plough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”
The longest word in the dictionary without any vowels is rhythm.
Flabellation is the use of a fan to cool something down.
Scarecrows were once known as hobidy-boobies.
When skateboarding first took off it was known as sidewalk surfing.
In written English the letter Q only appears once in every 500 letters. It appears 4 times in this piece, including the one in the previous sentence.
A word formed by joining together two parts of existing words is called a portmanteau word and many new words are added to the dictionary this way. Brunch is a portmanteau of breakfast and lunch, while motel is a portmanteau of motorcar and hotel. It is said that Oscar Wilde pushed duds (clothes) and attitude together to create dude.
We hope you enjoyed those little English facts, feel free to add your own in the comments!
absolutely brilliant loved the ‘ough’ section, many thanks for the info
Very interesting piece. However, in the -ough section, which stated there are 9 variations, I counted only 8 in the example sentence given. I saw that both “plough” and “ploughman” were included, but these are pronounced identically. So unless I’ve counted incorrectly, there are only 8 different -ough pronunciations in the example given.
” The longest word in the dictionary without any vowels is rhythm.”
The letter Y is the vowel in this case, n’est-ce pas? I think of Y as a consonant when it is the initial letter of a word – yellow, yes, youth – and as a vowel when it serves the same function as the letter I (cry, try, rhythm).
In the English language, Y is never recognised as a vowel.
If transcribed in phonetics y certainly will take the form of I sound and even we count vowels we are counting the sounds in that particular word so cannot say rythm to be the longest vowel free word
In the old days of in-school chanting, we learned the vowels were “a e i o u and sometimes y.”
….” and sometimes y and w “…..
I was a already chanting this when I saw your comment.
Not true. The old rule was “aeiou and sometimes y and w.”
We were taught, in American grammar schhol, that the vowels are aeiou, sometimes y and w.
Remember what your kindergarten teacher taught you? Vowels include A, E, I, O, & U….and sometimes, Y!
It’s a consonant regardless
Loved it! There are only 4 words (and their variations) that start with “dw” – dwell (dwelling, dwellings, dwelled, dwelt), dwarf, dweeb, dwindle (dwindles, dwindled, dwindling). Dweeb is slang.
I loved this.
Carolyn’s and Eesha’s comments not withstanding (and ccording to my Parisian wife, “n’est ce pas” is not English ), another six letter word without a vowel (and it is in the dictionary) is SYZYGY. I would surmise that, with some cogitation, other anomalies can be found.
great to know wildean term “dude”…a great post altogether
The phrase in Persian that “checkmate” comes from actually means “the king is dead.”
And it’s originally arabic 🙂
Yes, English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.
Take a “bough”! ?
There are only two words as far as I know ending in ‘shion’
Fashion
Cushion
Another unique word: CLEAVE The only english word which defines a word and its opposite. To bring together and also to tear apart.
The classification of English alphabet is thus:
Vowels: a e i o u
Semi-vowels: w y (as they behave like both as vowels and consonants)
Consonants: b c d…z
“The word uncopyrightable is the longest word in the dictionary where no letter is repeated twice.” No it isn’t, it’s the longest word where no letter is repeated once!
Thus, we can say, “Uncopyrightable” is the longest word where no letter is repeated.”
Or just repeated?
“Almost” is the longest word alphabetically written.
So, “hangry” is a new portmanteau word. As for “sidewalk surfing”, that was the name of a song about skateboarding. We always called it skateboarding, even in the early 60’s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHwDGQ6QYfU
“Where no letter is repeated twice” did not need “twice”. “Repeated twice” would mean the letter would appear 3x.
My favourite thing about English, and I say this all the time, is that it has wonderful and interesting rules. However, it’s the exceptions to those rules which actually make it work.
Brilliant!! Love it!! Especially the ough paragraph. If I were to add my own it would be that the words GOLF and POSH are acronyms. Golf is Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbided and posh is Port Out Stabourd Home . Great post!!
Didn’t Dr. Seuss write a book about “-ough”?
if the writer/author of this article were to use a slightly lighter shade of grey/gray, we couldnt read it and thus it would be wasted space – would this qualify the use of the words floccinaucinihilipilification?
“…where no letter is repeated twice.”
Repeated? Or repeated twice?
Sugar and sure are the only two words in the English language that begin with su but make the sh sound. I love completely useless facts!!
The only (I think) word using two hyphens is ne’er-do-well
Happy-go-lucky
In what universe could ‘w’ EVER be considered a vowel? It must be a non standard English speaking universe. W can be coupled with H to produce a SLIGHTLY different sound when spoken. W is also a silent letter mainly in front of R
I was going someone would answer that question. I’ve never known it to be a vowel.