English – Some Interesting Facts
-Published on 19th March 2022 by Oxford School of English-
1. “GO” is the shortest sentence in English language and can be called a complete sentence in itself.

2. “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis” is considered the longest word in English. It’s plural form ““pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokonioses” is the only word matching its number of letters.

3. “set” is the word with the greatest number of definitions in English. It is estimated to have 467 definitions.

4. Can you think of a one single word having all these words : “The, There, He, In, Rein, Her, Here, Ere, Therein, Herein”. It’s “therein”. The word consists of all these words, that too without rearrangement of any letters.

5. Pangram is the word for a sentence containing all the letters in the language. We all know the famous “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy little dog”, don’t we ?.

6. Can you think of a word in English with 3 consecutive double letters ? That is “Bookkeeper” and “Bookkeeping”.

7. A word with all letters in alphabetical order is “Almost” which has the distinction of being the longest word in that order.

8. The oldest, shortest and most commonly used word in old and modern English is “I”

9. With one in eight of all the letters written in English is “e” that is the most commonly used letter in English language

10. Can you think of a set of letters that can be pronounced in multiple ways ? Well, it is “ough”. Here is a sentence with all forms of “ough” : “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scanborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”

11. “uncopyrightable” is the longest English word we can spell without repeating any letters.

12. “month”, “orange” and “purple” are the only words in English that don’t have any other word rhyming with them.

13. English language is like an ever-expanding universe, with one new word added to the English language every 2 hours and around 4,000 new words added every year.

14. “s” sits on the top of the chart with the greatest number of English words beginning with it.

15. The dot over the letter “I” is call “Tittle”

16. Ever thought about the words we repeat too often, like “actually”, “basically”, “honestly” etc. They are called “crutch” and don’t add any significant value to a sentence.

17. The word “Alphabet” consists of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta.
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