If you like words as I do then you might like this. Some things about the English language you likely didn’t know The Global Language Monitor says the English language is made up of 1,025,109 words but it’s a tough guess because so much of our language comes from other languages. It’s not important anyway because the average person only knows about 50,000 words. English is a fascinating tongue and while I could make up a list of oddities that would go on forever I chose to limit myself to just a few. I hope you find this edifying (If you know that word, good for you, if not you just learned a new one but you’ll have to look it up for the meaning). 1.English is made up of lemmas which is the base form of any word. The ten most common Lemmas are the, to, be, of, and, a, that, have, in, and I. Chances are very good that you probably can’t write a sentence without using at least one of them. 2. It has been said that words have lifespans, that some might live up to 20,000 years, but how would we know that? 3.In our high tech, information age new words are added to the language constantly. In 2013 words like prepping, omnishambles, michelada, selfie and phablet were added to name a few. I found one source that estimated that we create a new word every 98 minutes (really…how do they come up with those numbers 98 minutes?). 4.Did you know that English is the official language of almost 60 sovereign states. It is the third-most-common native language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. 5.According to the website World English, The top ten most common words in English are the, of, to, and, a, in, is, it, you, that. 6.Then, there are English words that never really caught on. According to the Global Language Monitor words like abacinate: (to blind someone using red-hot metal) has not become a household word (I wonder why). Neither have words like algerining (sneaking around with the intent of committing a burglary) or Autolatrist (one who worships himself). One that should have caught on that didn’t is dactylion (he tip of the middle finger). You would think that in the age of “flipping the bird” dactylion would be a commonly used term. 7.Did you know that the dot above a lowercase “i” or “j” is called a “Title.” 8.And…you are probably unaware that the longest word in English with all its letters in alphabetical order is “aegilops.” Hmmm…could have put this one in on number 6. “Aegilops” is a genus of plants in the grass family Poaceae (whoops…another one that could go in 6) 9.Recently I read somewhere that the oldest known word in the English language is “Who” which supposedly dates back 20,000 years. Seriously, how would anyone know that? 20,000 years is before anyone was writing anything. 10.This one makes sense, though. One lover of words said his research indicated that the longest one syllable word is “scraunched,” the ten letter word is found in a 1620 translation of Don Quixote. 11. The longest word containing no repeating letters, including every vowel, is “uncopyrightable,” at 15 letters. 12.There are nine words in English that contain two “u”s in a row. I’ll give you one “Muumuu” you can look up the rest. 13. In a huge 1934 blunder they will never live down the famed Webster’s released a dictionary that containing a made up word, “Dord.” It was an accident that wasn’t caught until 1939. And it actually remained in Webster’s dictionaries until 1947. Dord supposedly meant “Density” but it doesn’t …or does it --- being as Webster said it did for 13 years. Go ahead, use it, see if you are challenged. 14.Did you know that there are only four words that end with “-dous?” They are; tremendous, stupendous, hazardous and horrendous. 15.More interesting English facts. The longest word with all the letters in alphabetical order is “Amost.” The only two words in our language that end in –gry are “hungry and Angry.” And – the longest word without the main vowels is “Rhythms.” I hope you found this enlightening and maybe even interesting. You may share without permission.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 18:16:15 +0000
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