Huntington, Kelly, ESL / Did You Know...?

Did You Know...?

Here are some interesting facts about the English language...

The word "set" has more definitions than any other word in the English language.

"Underground" is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters "und."

There are only four words in the English language which end in "-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

The longest place-name still in use is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwe-nuakit natahu, a New Zealand hill.

There is a seven-letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, "therein": the,there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.

The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable".

There is only ONE word in the English language with three consecutive sets of double letters... Bookkeeper.

In the English language there are only three words that have a letter that repeats six times. Degenerescence (six e’s), Indivisibility (six i’s), and nonannouncement (six n’s).

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."

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.

The shortest word in the English language with all its letters in alphabetical order is the word "almost."

The longest word in the English language is 1909 letters long and it refers to a distinct part of DNA.

The letter most in use in the English language is "E" and the letter "Q" is least used.

Out of all the eight letter words in the English language, only one has only one vowel in it: "strength".

Of all the languages in the world, English has the largest vocabulary about 800,000 words.
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
No language has more synonyms than English.
"Four" is the only number whose number of letters in the name equals the number.
"Rhythms" is the longest English word without the normal vowels, a, e, i, o, or u.
The most common letters in English are
R S T L N E.
"Go." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
English is the most widespread language in the world and is more widely spoken and written than any other language.
Over 700 million people, speak English, as a foreign language.
Of all the world's languages (over 2,700) English is arguably the richest in vocabulary; and that the Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words, and a further half-million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued.
The main language used throughout the world on the internet is English.
The shortest complete sentence in the English language is “I am.”
The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” uses every letter of the alphabet!
The only three words in the English language to have 2 consecutive u’s is vacuum, residuum, and continuum.
The very first dictionary “The American” took Noah Webster 20 years to put together.
The word “alphabet” is derived from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet: “alpha” and “beta”.

The only word in the English language that has 4 sets of double letters in a row is "balloonneer".

Q is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the United States!

Here are some interesting facts about language(s):

The only Major League Baseball team to have both its city's name and its team name in a foreign language is the San Diego Padres.

The Philippines has more than 1,000 regional dialects and two official languages.

Somalia is the only African country in which the entire population speaks the same language, Somali.

There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today. However, about 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers.

The most widely spoken language in the world is Mandarin Chinese. There are 885,000,000 people in China that speak that language.

The language of a society changes slowly but steadily with the result that an educated person will not be able to read or understand words in his language written 500 years ago.

Many languages in Africa include a “click” sound that is pronounced at the same time as other sounds. You must learn these languages in childhood to do it properly.

Seoul, the South Korean capital, just means "the capital" in the Korean language.