Some useless facts you didn't know about the English language
At least one-sixth of Earth's population speak English as a native or second language.
Thanks to the many invasions in Great Britain and its current position as lingua franca, English is the language with the richest vocabulary (c. 250,000 words).
Unlike other languages such as Spanish or French, English does not have an academy in charge of regulating it.
Shit actually means "cattle diarrhea."
The closest languages to English are Frisian and Dutch.
English vocabulary is 25% Latin 25% French 25% Germanic Origin 5% Greek and 20% Other languages.
Placing a comma before "and" to mark the end of a list (e.g. apples, grapes, and oranges), is known as an Oxford Comma.
There is no word that rhymes with purple, orange or month.
In contrast to other children who acquire a language with a more transparent orthography such as Spanish or Italian; children who acquire English as their L1 take two more years to learn how to read.
The first English dictionary was written in 1755.
A couple hundred years ago the letter k was pronounced in words such as "knight" and "know".
Ghoti is an invented word that exemplifies irregularities of English pronunciation, by taking the sound /f/ s in enough, the sound /I/ as in women, and the sound /ʃ/ as in nation. Therefore, "fish" might just as well be written "ghoti".
The word set is the one that has the most definitions.
I, we, two and three; are the most ancient words in English (c. 10,000 years)
9 out of 10 Swedes speak English.
Most formal and scientific words crome either from Latin or Greek.
Shakespeare invented many of the words he used.
The Latin Alphabet has been used since the 9th century, replacing Anglo-Saxon Runes.
If we tried to read Old English we wouldn't be able to understand practically anything.
Around 4,000 words are added each year to the dictionary.
The sentence, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog contains all the letters of the alphabet.
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