English is arguably the most confusing language in the world. That’s why we love it (perhaps I speak for myself – that’s why I have a language blog.) Nonetheless, I’m sure you will find the following language trivia interesting.
- 5 billion – that’s the number of words in the Oxford English Corpus
The Oxford English Corpus is a collection of 21st-century texts from all over the English-speaking world, including Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. It is used to track the way the English language changes over time. And boy, does it change!
- 20 000 years is how old the word ‘who’ is making it the oldest known word
Among the other oldest words are ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘two’ and ‘three’.
- The dot on lower case letters ‘i’ and ‘j’ is called a tittle
The original definition of the word ‘tittle’ was used to describe a tiny amount of something.
- 50-plus countries use English as an official language
In addition to the U.S., U.K., and Australia, these countries include Singapore, Ghana, and India.
- A word that is spelled the same backwards and forwards is called a palindrome
Palindromes include words such as racecar, level, and kayak.
- 1,000 to 20,000 years is considered the lifespan of words in our language
Researchers can even predict that words such as ‘dirty’, ‘push’ and ‘stick’ will die out soon, based on how different the word is in multiple languages.
- Dictionaries sometimes publish made-up words by mistake
The word ‘dord’ was accidentally printed in Webster’s dictionary in 1934 and stayed there until 1947.
- 50,000 is the number of words known by the average person. These include conjunctions, pronouns and articles which make up 25% of the language.
9. Words that we repeat often are called ‘crutch words’
We use them even though they don’t add much meaning to our sentences. These include words like ‘basically’, ‘actually’, or ‘honestly’, essentially, you know, like.
- 98 minutes is the duration in which a new word is created. That adds up to over 4,000 words per year!
Inspired by EC English Blog