7 Interesting Facts About the English Language

English, the most used language worldwide, is not that easy to learn or to speak. The language English is the most preferred all around the globe. English sounds classy and formal but has so many hidden facts too. Compared to the other languages, English may appear simple or easy but is literally full of confusion, crazy inventions, strange words, needless words, misinterpretations, and even mistakes.

Posted On September 9th, 2021

PANGRAM

Have you ever heard about Pangram? Pangram in the English Language is a sentence that contains every letter in the language. Sounds interesting? Isn’t it. One of the best examples of a pangram is ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’ The sentence has every letter and hence is a pangram. Can you think of some more Pangrams?

THE LONGEST WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Most of you must be thinking of SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS as the longest word in the English language that simply means ‘fantastic’ and was popularized by the movie Mary Poppins eventually added to the dictionary. But there is a longer word than this, i.e., PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS, which means a type of lung disease caused by inhalation of dust and ashes. So, now try pronouncing it!

GHOST WORDS

Sounds interesting, right? Ghost words are referred to that words that do not actually exist or are used but appeared in the dictionary due to printing errors. For example, a nonexistent word, ‘DORD,’ appeared in the dictionary for eight years in the 20th century. Now it has become a ‘ghost word.’

CRUTCH WORDS

Have you ever thought that we use certain words that add no value or meaning to the sentence? However, we still add them, such as “Oh I was likes stunned for some time and then everything was like… and like….”, it is so obvious that here like is adding no value to the sentence. So, the words ‘like,’ ‘actually,’ ‘honestly,’ and so on are called Crutch words.

AMBIGRAMS

Ambigrams are fun! Do you know what ambigrams are? Ambigrams are words that remain the same even when they are revered. Such SWIMS will remain SWIMS only when it is reversed. Isn’t this amazing?

GIRL WAS ONCE USED TO DENOTE A SMALL BOY TOO

In the English language, we use a girl to denote a specific gender, i.e., females. In a nutshell, a girl was once used as the term ‘child.’ but the earlier girl was the word used to denote both small girl and boy regardless of the gender.

THE SHORTEST AND COMPLETE SENTENCE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

I, the shortest, complete, and the most common sentence in the English language, are known by all. It has been revealed by the medieval manuscripts that ‘I’ is one of the shortest and the oldest words in the English Language. Moreover, it is the most commonly used word too.