Did you know? (Le saviez-vous?)

DID YOU KNOW?

1. English’s most common vowel is “e” and its most common consonant is “r”. The most common letter overall is “e” and the less used letter is “q”. The most common word is also made up of a single letter, and that is “I”.
2. The letter “s” is used to begin more words than any other letter in the English language.
3. The shortest sentence is made out of just three letters. “I am.”.
4. The oldest word in the English language is “Town”.
5. The first version of an English dictionary was written in 1755.
6. While the word “almost” doesn’t seem to have anything special about it, it is actually the longest word in which all letters are grouped alphabetically.
7. This was a hard one for students who learned the language by listening. The past tense word for “dare” is “durst”.
8. English is the world’s richest language with the Oxford English dictionary listing nearly half a million words. It is believed to reach one million words if technical terms were taken into consideration and completely cataloged.
9. Close to 80 percent of all the information stored on computers across the world is in English.
10. A sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet is no longer called a sentence, it is called a pangram.
11. Orange, silver and purple are the only words in the English language that don’t rhyme with anything.
12. “Cleave” seems an unremarkable word. It’s synonyms, however, are quite interesting, making “cleave” the only word whose synonyms are antonyms of each other, “adhere” and “separate”.
13. “Uncopywrightable” is the only 15 letter word in the English language that doesn’t repeat any letters.
14. “Screeched” is not a “Saved by the Bell” reference; it is the longest single syllable word in the English language
15. There are some words that are pretty hard to rhyme with. For example, there are just 4 words who end with “-dous” and those are “tremendous”, “stupendous”, “hazardous” and “horrendous”. If you thought that was tough, there are only two that end in “-gry”’ “angry” and “hungry”.
16. “Eunoia” is the shortest word in the language that contains all the vowels. It means “ to be in a state of normal health”.
17. “Rhythm” is the longest word that doesn’t really contain a true vowel.
18. The English language has words that exist only in the plural. So binoculars, shears, trousers, pants and so on don’t really have a singular form.