21 Surprising Facts About Words and the English Language

Facts about words

• The Oxford English Dictionary has over 170,000 words in current use, and around 1,000 new entries are added each year.
• The longest word in a major dictionary is PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS: 45 letters, for a lung disease caused by fine silica dust.
• "Go." is one of the shortest complete sentences in English, with an implied "you".
• SET has more meanings than any other English word: the Oxford English Dictionary lists over 430 senses.
• QUEUE is still pronounced the same when you remove its last four letters.
• DREAMT is the only common English word that ends in MT.
• RHYTHMS is the longest everyday word with none of the vowels A, E, I, O or U.

Facts about letters

• E is the most common letter in English, making up about 13% of written text.
• Q and Z are among the rarest letters, which is why word games give them more points.
• TYPEWRITER can be typed using only the top row of a QWERTY keyboard.
• STEWARDESSES is one of the longest words you can type with only your left hand.
• BOOKKEEPER has three double letters in a row: OO, KK, EE.
• SUBDERMATOGLYPHIC, at 17 letters, is thought to be the longest English word with no repeated letter.
• ALMOST is one of the longest common words with its letters in alphabetical order.
• The ampersand (&) was once recited as the 27th letter of the alphabet. "And per se and" slurred into "ampersand".

Facts about where English came from

Some of this is directly useful on a word grid: E is everywhere, and English loves stacking endings onto words.

• Shakespeare is credited with introducing over 1,700 words, including BEDROOM, LONELY and GENEROUS.
• In Middle English, GIRL meant a child of any gender. It narrowed to mean a female child around the 15th century.
• English is a Germanic language, but over 60% of its vocabulary comes from Latin and French, largely after the Norman Conquest of 1066.
• That is why English has pairs like COW and BEEF: the animal kept its Germanic name, while the meat took the French one.
• "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" has been used as a typing exercise since at least the late 1800s because it uses every letter.
• A sentence using each letter exactly once is called a perfect pangram, and making one that reads naturally is famously hard.

• The patterns and endings to look for